In my last foray into recycling in the old days, I reminisced about the second life of cigarette butts. This time around, I want to reflect on how you can reduce your carbon footprint by re-using your bath water and address alternatives to toilet paper that were the norm in post-war Germany and which you might want to consider, should the need arise. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention.
We lived in a house that had been built in 1349 and it showed its age. This was a massive three-story stone affair with walls six feet thick and one toilet that emptied unto the steep hill behind the house and down into the creek in the valley below. There was no septic tank, no drainage field, no formal sewage system at all. Over the centuries, the back wall had sprung deep cracks, some of them big enough for birds to nest in them. My parents and I shared this house with four refugee families. There were 15 people in all, including the three of us.
We occupied half of the second floor. Our bathroom was not a bathroom in the North American sense of the word. It lacked a toilet, only contained a washstand with running cold water and an old-fashioned claw-footed metal bathtub connected to a wood-heated hot water tank. This meant that if you wanted to take a hot bath, you had to lug up armloads of firewood from the shed in the yard downstairs, light and tend a wood fire underneath the tank to heat the water and wait for at least two hours for that water to be hot enough to use.
There was no shower. Showers were not a German thing then. Real men didn’t use deodorant. Most women didn’t either. Women also didn’t shave their armpits or their legs. B.O. also was not a bad thing. Everyone stank equally, which cancelled out the discomfort of objectionable smells. You simply didn’t realize that you reeked. I discovered this secret only when I stepped off the boat in Hoboken, New Jersey, and suddenly found myself isolated with my peculiar, and I‘d say, dank bouquet.
Naturally, baths were a luxury reserved for every other Saturday evening, whether you needed one or not. The first one in, usually my mother, had the luxury of clean hot water. My father came next, using the same slightly less-hot bath water and, finally, it was my turn in the by now lukewarm, twice pre-used, grey water. The refugees, who shared this house with us, did not have access to our bathroom. I don’t know where or whether they bathed.
You might want to consider this method of saving and reusing water in view of the rising cost of water and our recurring water shortages on Saturna. Try it. I can truly recommend it, if you’re not the squeamish type. It’s cozy. It brings the family closer together. It also creates an urgency to get on with it, before the water turns cold, with the result that you waste less soap. And, in case you’re worried about the effects on your general health, nobody came down with boils, suffered excessive hair loss or broke out in a debilitating rash.
And speaking of the importance of water, let me acquaint you with a German invention with which you may not be familiar. This was at a time when there were few of the amenities we now take for granted and those that existed were rather basic. And yet, the idea of recycling and re-using was front and center, even under those dire circumstances.
One of the doorways off the hall on the second floor of our abode opened to the only washroom in the house. This was a tiny tiled space, maybe five feet square. It had a 12-foot ceiling and a tall, very narrow opaque-painted window. None of the windows in the house had storm windows. In the winter, the wind usually whistled right through, causing the curtains to ghost out into the room. It was freezing in there. This comfort station contained one of those truly German crappers, which sports a presentation shelf inside, so that you could inspect and admire your creation before flushing it down the drain. About seven feet above this contraption hung a white enameled metal cistern, which held about a gallon of water and a chain pulley. A pipe connected it to the toilet bowl below. You pulled the chain and the water would rush down through the pipe, hit your production – patiently waiting on its ledge – with full force, splatter everything against the inside front of the bowl and on down the chute and out the wall in back and down the hill. There was no water faucet or washbasin to wash your hands. Obviously, the back of the house was not a good place to be at any time, but especially not in the summer when it got hot and putrid back there.
If you wanted to use the toilet in winter, you’d better bring a large pot of boiling water to thaw out the ice in the cistern and pipes. Even then the process was iffy and the water could be slow making its way down the frozen pipes. Sometimes, on very cold days, you could pull all you wanted on the chain and nothing happened. I used to forget the hot water on purpose sometimes, just to listen to the pleas and, more likely, multi-lingual maledictions of the refugees, who were left to clean up the mess, if they didn’t want the bowl to overflow.
Keep in mind, the water had to be brought to a boil on the kitchen stove, before you could take it to the toilet. The refugees, other than Frau Smetma, who lived downstairs in the old feudal kitchen, did not have kitchen stoves, only electric cooking coils. In other words, going to the bathroom in our house in winter had to be, by necessity, a thoughtful and well-planned process, never spur of the moment. It required timing to avoid the queue outside the door.
The other thing about this john was that we’re talking about a time that was pre-toilet paper. Maybe there was toilet paper available elsewhere, but not in our village. There was no such thing as Charmin or soft 4-ply paper available in our stores. The tool of choice was the weekly newspaper, with each page meticulously cut into eight equal pieces, each about six inches square and stuck on a nail in the wall. You had to crumple it before use. I don’t get nostalgic about that, because newsprint is rough on your behind, it tears easy and the ink comes off. It also tends to smear and could be painful, even distressing, if God forbid, you suffered from piles or hemorrhoids. It also doesn’t clean very well.
Then there was the German hang-up about wastefulness. The use of multiple squares of paper was frowned upon as a waste of scarce resources. There was after all only one newspaper per week for the 15 people in the house. Our local broadsheet was a thin affair, sixteen pages at most or 128 squares for the paper spike per week. That meant 18 squares per day for 15 people. That also meant that you were pretty much restricted to at most one visit per day. How German is that! Not much room for error either. God help you, if you were afflicted by “the dreaded diarrhee,” as some of the refugees used to call it.
The refugees never contributed paper to the communal toilet. Their only involvement in this process, other than the actual use, was that the sisters Baerenklau, three spinsters who lived on the third floor, collected the paper from my father each Monday, read it and then cut it up into appropriate squares for spiking. They were also the ones who supervised the daily count of the spiked paper squares to make sure no one took more than their share for their ablutions – one per visit. They’d confront and berate the miscreant who didn’t stick to the prescribed number. That usually was me.
I did like the educational aspect of using newspapers on the crapper. I loved to read. Sometimes I got so engrossed in trying to read a particular story and piecing it back together from the squares spiked on the wall – they were never in the right sequence - that I forgot about the time and would be rudely interrupted by pounding on the door. This cozy arrangement led to line-ups and to sometimes-loud arguments that only ended when my father shouted from his office that if they didn’t shut up, he’d shoot them all.
Think about all the trees that could be saved and the impact that would have on global warming, if we forsook toilet paper and re-used the Times Colonist, for example. It would probably delay the catastrophe everyone is predicting by at least a year or two and give that particular newspaper a use it deserves. Food for thought. I’m hoping, though, that for hygienic reasons we’d be able to agree on more than one square per person per use.
In future issues, I will endeavor to teach you how to make shampoo out of undiluted birch sap, how to re-use paper towels, thus doubling their lifespan and how to use a wool sock to drive off trespassers. I plan also to let you in on the secret of how to raid your neighbor’s chicken coop, without getting fingered as the culprit, share a recipe for the use of deer innards in a gourmet meal and give you some well-tested pointers on ways to re-use a beer stein, once you emptied it of its contents.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Kilroy Was Here
Most six- or ten-year-olds in my day had heroes, mostly cartoon or comic book heroes like Spiderman or Superman. My hero was Kilroy. You may not remember Kilroy or even know who he was. Let me give you a quick primer. Kilroy was our liberator, who freed us from the yoke of the Nazis, after bombing the crap out of the place first, of course. Kilroy was our Simon Bolivar, our George Washington. He morphed into my Svengali, subtlely and unnoticeably, at first, but soon had me under his complete influence and sway.
There was nothing sinister in this conversion. I was a willing acolyte. I bought into his spiel with an open heart and without coercion. I loved the attention. My infatuation with Kilroy grew when I became a teenager. Jazz and rock’n’roll replaced Hershey bars and hot chocolate. Kilroy became Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Bill Haley, Chubby Checkers and, of course, Elvis Presley. I had all their singles. My father despaired over my playing be-bop and jitterbug and rock-a-billy. He called it “Neger-Musik” and couldn’t understand why his youngest son would possibly listen to something so foreign and unstructured and “un-deutsch.”
This is the story of my relationship with Kilroy. It opens in the year zero, the year the war and our old life ended and our new life began. The year of the apocalypse. 1945. This is the year in which I first betrayed the country of my birth for a couple of Hershey bars, a few sticks of chewing gum, some slices of white bread and a few mugs of hot chocolate. You might say that I was bought off cheap. I look at it as a kind of religious conversion, as one of Kilroy’s unmitigated success stories.
It begins when the American graffiti ‘Kilroy was here’ replaced the swastikas and Nazi slogans on the busted walls and toppled columns of German cities. The war was over and ‘Hitler kaput’, like the cities, the Jews and Germany (what the hell was that anyway?). Instead Kilroy came to teach us about chewing gum and baseball and jitterbug and jazz and Coca Cola and words like democracy and the pursuit of happiness, whatever that was. ‘Kilroy was here’ were three words as splendid to us as those famous three words from the French revolution, on which Kilroy lectured us. Kilroy de-nazified us, re-educated us, became our best friend. All this, while I slept on red sheets, from which my mother had cut and burned the white circle with the four times broken black cross.
Here’s how Kilroy achieved this feat. Every week on Wednesday, the U.S. Military Government dispatched a ¾ ton truck with two soldiers to our village, whose job it was to re-educate us kids. To teach us about democracy, the triumph of good over evil, how bad the Nazis were.
Their plan was simple. They set up a movie projector and screen in our classroom and showed Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons and U.S. newsreels. The cartoons were in black and white and in English and we couldn’t understand a word, but they were still pretty funny. The best part was that if we watched the cartoons, we received a mug of hot chocolate and a bun. We loved that hot chocolate. It tasted delicious. We had never tasted chocolate before. And white bread was something we’d never seen before either. It was exotic. White bread and chocolate was what America was all about to us. And sometimes, when we clapped really loud at the end of the show, the Americans would give us Hershey bars and chewing gum. They had to explain to us that you didn’t eat gum or we would have swallowed it whole. We all wanted to go to America and drink hot chocolate and eat white bread and chew gum every day, all day. For me it was an epiphany.
Let me put into perspective why those Hershey bars were such a big deal. During the war and the first three or four years after, not even Christmas was an occasion for special gifts. Typical Christmas presents for me and, I imagine, for most kids in that part of the world, were a handful of Filberts or walnuts, a bag of apples and, after the war, perhaps an orange (singular). There were no toys, no candy, nothing as exotic as chocolate. And we looked forward to those gifts. They were a big deal. We were happy with what we got, because the alternative was nothing.
Most of the kids I grew up with received no gifts at all. If they were lucky, they had a Christmas tree, with real candles, by the way. Birthdays were not celebrated – no birthday gifts. To receive a chocolate bar was a memorable occasion. To receive it from foreigners, who we’d been told were bloody killers of women and children, who were savages, whom we were told to fear and hate, was quite extraordinary.
It wasn’t that our bread tasted bad. It was just that it was made with rye flour, which sometimes was mixed with wood fiber (speak: sawdust) to stretch it. It came in six-pound round loaves, which my mother baked every other Saturday in the communal bread oven. Before I knew about white bread, I thought my mother’s bread tasted pretty good. But once I discovered Kilroy’s buns, it was all over for me with the rye bread. Rye bread was heavy and dark and it sat in your belly like a rock and made you feel stuffed. Since butter was hard to come by, I used to spread the cooled thick scum from boiled whole milk on a slice of rye bread to make it go down easier and to take the taste of sawdust away. Sometimes, for a special treat, my mother let me spread a little brown sugar on top of the scum. This scum tasted pretty good on rye, but it couldn’t compete with the flavor of those buns. You didn’t need anything with them, no milk scum, no sugar. They were soft and tasty. The hot chocolate was a bonus. Of course, you had to be there for the head count prior to the showing of the cartoons. If you missed that, no hot chocolate, no white bun.
We didn’t care about their rationale behind their gifts. We were happy. This is how Kilroy first corrupted us. From then on, we believed America and Americans were number one and our true friends. The misery of our past as forgotten, replaced by our longing for the next Wednesday morning.
Kilroy did such a terrific selling job that he coaxed me to live in his land of milk and honey and Hershey bars and Disneyland. Kilroy’s land became mine. He shared his magnificent home with me. He made me his brother. My past disappeared, replaced by the American dream, Camelot, the Promised Land. Kilroy offered me freedom and safety, a place in the sun. Kilroy and I became one and the same. Bound together by identical hopes and goals. Kilroy came to represent the white knight in shining armor, who rode forth to slay the wicked dragons of, first, fascism and then bolshevism. Kilroy’s hard work had paid off, at least for this ignorant kraut.
This unabashed enthusiasm for all things American dimmed only when Kilroy strapped himself into his B-52, loaded it with napalm and disappeared into the setting sun to write ‘Kilroy was here’ on the broken walls of pagodas and the ruins of other ancient cities.
This really tested our friendship and for several years I was adrift. I felt betrayed. Then I realized that there is no such thing as Camelot, that my American dream was no more than that, a dream, a veneer that hid some ugly truths. I understood that America was really no different from Europe. Only the context was different. It was a bit of a rude awakening for me. But I came to terms with my disappointment. I decided that I had to look out for myself and couldn’t afford to mope around. I had to concentrate on getting ahead with my own life and forget about the fake ideals Kilroy had imbued in me all those years ago. I guess I had graduated from the enthusiasm for and wonderment about the America of my youth to the reality of life on the ground, with all its pimples and boils. Our friendship fizzled.
There was nothing sinister in this conversion. I was a willing acolyte. I bought into his spiel with an open heart and without coercion. I loved the attention. My infatuation with Kilroy grew when I became a teenager. Jazz and rock’n’roll replaced Hershey bars and hot chocolate. Kilroy became Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Bill Haley, Chubby Checkers and, of course, Elvis Presley. I had all their singles. My father despaired over my playing be-bop and jitterbug and rock-a-billy. He called it “Neger-Musik” and couldn’t understand why his youngest son would possibly listen to something so foreign and unstructured and “un-deutsch.”
This is the story of my relationship with Kilroy. It opens in the year zero, the year the war and our old life ended and our new life began. The year of the apocalypse. 1945. This is the year in which I first betrayed the country of my birth for a couple of Hershey bars, a few sticks of chewing gum, some slices of white bread and a few mugs of hot chocolate. You might say that I was bought off cheap. I look at it as a kind of religious conversion, as one of Kilroy’s unmitigated success stories.
It begins when the American graffiti ‘Kilroy was here’ replaced the swastikas and Nazi slogans on the busted walls and toppled columns of German cities. The war was over and ‘Hitler kaput’, like the cities, the Jews and Germany (what the hell was that anyway?). Instead Kilroy came to teach us about chewing gum and baseball and jitterbug and jazz and Coca Cola and words like democracy and the pursuit of happiness, whatever that was. ‘Kilroy was here’ were three words as splendid to us as those famous three words from the French revolution, on which Kilroy lectured us. Kilroy de-nazified us, re-educated us, became our best friend. All this, while I slept on red sheets, from which my mother had cut and burned the white circle with the four times broken black cross.
Here’s how Kilroy achieved this feat. Every week on Wednesday, the U.S. Military Government dispatched a ¾ ton truck with two soldiers to our village, whose job it was to re-educate us kids. To teach us about democracy, the triumph of good over evil, how bad the Nazis were.
Their plan was simple. They set up a movie projector and screen in our classroom and showed Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons and U.S. newsreels. The cartoons were in black and white and in English and we couldn’t understand a word, but they were still pretty funny. The best part was that if we watched the cartoons, we received a mug of hot chocolate and a bun. We loved that hot chocolate. It tasted delicious. We had never tasted chocolate before. And white bread was something we’d never seen before either. It was exotic. White bread and chocolate was what America was all about to us. And sometimes, when we clapped really loud at the end of the show, the Americans would give us Hershey bars and chewing gum. They had to explain to us that you didn’t eat gum or we would have swallowed it whole. We all wanted to go to America and drink hot chocolate and eat white bread and chew gum every day, all day. For me it was an epiphany.
Let me put into perspective why those Hershey bars were such a big deal. During the war and the first three or four years after, not even Christmas was an occasion for special gifts. Typical Christmas presents for me and, I imagine, for most kids in that part of the world, were a handful of Filberts or walnuts, a bag of apples and, after the war, perhaps an orange (singular). There were no toys, no candy, nothing as exotic as chocolate. And we looked forward to those gifts. They were a big deal. We were happy with what we got, because the alternative was nothing.
Most of the kids I grew up with received no gifts at all. If they were lucky, they had a Christmas tree, with real candles, by the way. Birthdays were not celebrated – no birthday gifts. To receive a chocolate bar was a memorable occasion. To receive it from foreigners, who we’d been told were bloody killers of women and children, who were savages, whom we were told to fear and hate, was quite extraordinary.
It wasn’t that our bread tasted bad. It was just that it was made with rye flour, which sometimes was mixed with wood fiber (speak: sawdust) to stretch it. It came in six-pound round loaves, which my mother baked every other Saturday in the communal bread oven. Before I knew about white bread, I thought my mother’s bread tasted pretty good. But once I discovered Kilroy’s buns, it was all over for me with the rye bread. Rye bread was heavy and dark and it sat in your belly like a rock and made you feel stuffed. Since butter was hard to come by, I used to spread the cooled thick scum from boiled whole milk on a slice of rye bread to make it go down easier and to take the taste of sawdust away. Sometimes, for a special treat, my mother let me spread a little brown sugar on top of the scum. This scum tasted pretty good on rye, but it couldn’t compete with the flavor of those buns. You didn’t need anything with them, no milk scum, no sugar. They were soft and tasty. The hot chocolate was a bonus. Of course, you had to be there for the head count prior to the showing of the cartoons. If you missed that, no hot chocolate, no white bun.
We didn’t care about their rationale behind their gifts. We were happy. This is how Kilroy first corrupted us. From then on, we believed America and Americans were number one and our true friends. The misery of our past as forgotten, replaced by our longing for the next Wednesday morning.
Kilroy did such a terrific selling job that he coaxed me to live in his land of milk and honey and Hershey bars and Disneyland. Kilroy’s land became mine. He shared his magnificent home with me. He made me his brother. My past disappeared, replaced by the American dream, Camelot, the Promised Land. Kilroy offered me freedom and safety, a place in the sun. Kilroy and I became one and the same. Bound together by identical hopes and goals. Kilroy came to represent the white knight in shining armor, who rode forth to slay the wicked dragons of, first, fascism and then bolshevism. Kilroy’s hard work had paid off, at least for this ignorant kraut.
This unabashed enthusiasm for all things American dimmed only when Kilroy strapped himself into his B-52, loaded it with napalm and disappeared into the setting sun to write ‘Kilroy was here’ on the broken walls of pagodas and the ruins of other ancient cities.
This really tested our friendship and for several years I was adrift. I felt betrayed. Then I realized that there is no such thing as Camelot, that my American dream was no more than that, a dream, a veneer that hid some ugly truths. I understood that America was really no different from Europe. Only the context was different. It was a bit of a rude awakening for me. But I came to terms with my disappointment. I decided that I had to look out for myself and couldn’t afford to mope around. I had to concentrate on getting ahead with my own life and forget about the fake ideals Kilroy had imbued in me all those years ago. I guess I had graduated from the enthusiasm for and wonderment about the America of my youth to the reality of life on the ground, with all its pimples and boils. Our friendship fizzled.
Friday, June 6, 2008
On The Necessities Of Life
Enough about exotic foods, lack of sanitation and filthy habits. You must think that I spent my childhood in the gutter. Perhaps I did, when viewed from these enlightened shores. Today I want to show you that when you’re thirsty, or more correctly, when that demon rum has got you in his grip, necessity becomes the mother of invention. On Saturna, this problem is easily solved. You simply go to the General Store and you stock up on your favorite libation. I, however, have been in places for prolonged periods of time where there was no liquor store or any kind of a store, for that matter. If the urge for a stiff shot of something strong grabbed you by the throat there, you had to make do with what was at hand. This was in the military and if any of you have ever served in Uncle Sam’s army, you know that there are some things you will never be short of, like time, ammunition, gasoline, food, Coca Cola. Liquor, however, was not one of them.
Some of my buddies were convinced that if you strained gasoline through the charcoal of your gas mask filter, it took out most of the toxic ingredients like lead and the red coloring agent added to military gasoline to identify and differentiate it from the civilian version and some of the other unhealthy petroleum by-products you find in gasoline. If you mixed two parts of this charcoal-filtered gas with five parts of Coca Cola and added a dash of pepper, you had a concoction that would give you a pretty good jolt, as did butane, when filtered and mixed with Coca Cola. Some preferred sniffing formaldehyde. I favored charcoal-filtered Aqua Velva and Brut, which also went well with Coke. Of course, our gas masks were useless after that without the filter, but we didn’t think we’d ever need them for protection. Today, I’m surprised no one died from drinking this lethal soup, but, on the other hand, there were plenty of other causes in that place that could send you home in a body bag.
I don’t know why, because it is totally unrelated, but this talk about liquor makes me hungry for the taste of raw eggs. When I was a child, our next-door neighbor on the right was a farmer named Birkenbach. Herr Birkenbach had been in the Nazi’s bad books, because in 1944 he had plowed his fields on May Day, a high Nazi holiday, on which no one was allowed to work and the faithful were expected to goose-step, wave the flag, sing patriotic songs and listen to some Nazi bigwig’s lies. Herr Birkenbach had to pay a hefty fine and he was marked as an enemy of the people. Only the fact that four of his sons were fighting in Russia saved him from being sent to a concentration camp. The Birkenbach’s was a sizeable dairy farm. Their youngest son, Richard, was a year older than I and we were best friends.
Richard taught me how to eat eggs raw. We’d sneak into their chicken coop, liberate a couple of eggs, pierce one end with a needle and suck out the innards. They didn’t taste as bad as it sounds, as long as they weren’t fertilized. To fool his mother, we scattered the broken shells outside the coop and tossed bits of fox or badger hair from my father’s hunting trophies about, so it looked like a fox or badger had had a go at the chickens.
My mother regularly bought fresh eggs and milk from them, that is, until Herr Birkenbach’s May Day problems. After that, they refused to sell to us and Richard was no longer allowed to play with me, because they thought my father had denounced them.
The reason they believed that is that we were not locals. And more importantly, we were Protestants, Lutherans to be exact, and everyone else was Catholic. The villagers thought of us as heretics. My friend Richard confided to me once that their priest had told them that Lutherans were apostates and beset by the devil and that we grew horns and had a forked penis. Richard didn’t believe the line about the horns. He’d obviously checked me out and found none, but insisted on seeing my penis to make sure it wasn’t forked.
Anyone who wasn’t from there was a foreigner and to be mistrusted. So it must have been the foreigners who denounced Herr Birkenbach. They told my mother that there was no more milk for her. This meant that for the last year of the war, we had to buy what passed for milk in the store with ration cards. I remember it well. It was thin and looked blue and tasted like shit.
It was January 1945, before someone in the local Nazi Party office, who saw the end nearing and wanted to cover his ass, told Herr Birkenbach who really had denounced him. My father accepted his apologies. My mother and I never talked to them again.
However, the Birkenbach’s chicken coop became a source of non-rationed food for us after the end of the war. For most people, 4:30 in the morning, that hour before dawn, is a time when the mind is far from its sharpest, when reflexes are slowest, the brain idles in neutral and when the world is at its bleakest. As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been at my peak early in the morning. The hour before dawn is a very significant hour. People say that more folks die and more babies start the last stage of their journey into this world at that particular hour than at any other. It’s the witching hour. It’s the best time for an ambush, for a raid.
Most mornings, just before daybreak, I would sneak next door to the Birkenbach’s farm, into their hay barn, lift a loose board and squeeze into the adjacent chicken coop. The chickens, of course, would go berserk. You had to be quick, grab three or four eggs, strew some bits of carnivore hair about and get the hell out before one of the Birkenbachs, usually the missus, showed up to catch the thief. My father’s fox and badger pelts began to look pretty ratty. They never caught me. They did complain to my father about the foxes and badgers that regularly seemed to raid their chicken coop and asked him to shoot them. He told them that he was not allowed to carry a gun by order of the allied military government and couldn’t help them.
We ate eggs for breakfast and no one asked me to explain the origin of those eggs. My father had misgivings and I once overheard him talking to my mother about it and asking her where she got eggs almost every day, since he knew she was not on speaking terms with the Birkenbachs. My mother told him to enjoy his breakfast and not to worry, that God was providing.
Some of my buddies were convinced that if you strained gasoline through the charcoal of your gas mask filter, it took out most of the toxic ingredients like lead and the red coloring agent added to military gasoline to identify and differentiate it from the civilian version and some of the other unhealthy petroleum by-products you find in gasoline. If you mixed two parts of this charcoal-filtered gas with five parts of Coca Cola and added a dash of pepper, you had a concoction that would give you a pretty good jolt, as did butane, when filtered and mixed with Coca Cola. Some preferred sniffing formaldehyde. I favored charcoal-filtered Aqua Velva and Brut, which also went well with Coke. Of course, our gas masks were useless after that without the filter, but we didn’t think we’d ever need them for protection. Today, I’m surprised no one died from drinking this lethal soup, but, on the other hand, there were plenty of other causes in that place that could send you home in a body bag.
I don’t know why, because it is totally unrelated, but this talk about liquor makes me hungry for the taste of raw eggs. When I was a child, our next-door neighbor on the right was a farmer named Birkenbach. Herr Birkenbach had been in the Nazi’s bad books, because in 1944 he had plowed his fields on May Day, a high Nazi holiday, on which no one was allowed to work and the faithful were expected to goose-step, wave the flag, sing patriotic songs and listen to some Nazi bigwig’s lies. Herr Birkenbach had to pay a hefty fine and he was marked as an enemy of the people. Only the fact that four of his sons were fighting in Russia saved him from being sent to a concentration camp. The Birkenbach’s was a sizeable dairy farm. Their youngest son, Richard, was a year older than I and we were best friends.
Richard taught me how to eat eggs raw. We’d sneak into their chicken coop, liberate a couple of eggs, pierce one end with a needle and suck out the innards. They didn’t taste as bad as it sounds, as long as they weren’t fertilized. To fool his mother, we scattered the broken shells outside the coop and tossed bits of fox or badger hair from my father’s hunting trophies about, so it looked like a fox or badger had had a go at the chickens.
My mother regularly bought fresh eggs and milk from them, that is, until Herr Birkenbach’s May Day problems. After that, they refused to sell to us and Richard was no longer allowed to play with me, because they thought my father had denounced them.
The reason they believed that is that we were not locals. And more importantly, we were Protestants, Lutherans to be exact, and everyone else was Catholic. The villagers thought of us as heretics. My friend Richard confided to me once that their priest had told them that Lutherans were apostates and beset by the devil and that we grew horns and had a forked penis. Richard didn’t believe the line about the horns. He’d obviously checked me out and found none, but insisted on seeing my penis to make sure it wasn’t forked.
Anyone who wasn’t from there was a foreigner and to be mistrusted. So it must have been the foreigners who denounced Herr Birkenbach. They told my mother that there was no more milk for her. This meant that for the last year of the war, we had to buy what passed for milk in the store with ration cards. I remember it well. It was thin and looked blue and tasted like shit.
It was January 1945, before someone in the local Nazi Party office, who saw the end nearing and wanted to cover his ass, told Herr Birkenbach who really had denounced him. My father accepted his apologies. My mother and I never talked to them again.
However, the Birkenbach’s chicken coop became a source of non-rationed food for us after the end of the war. For most people, 4:30 in the morning, that hour before dawn, is a time when the mind is far from its sharpest, when reflexes are slowest, the brain idles in neutral and when the world is at its bleakest. As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been at my peak early in the morning. The hour before dawn is a very significant hour. People say that more folks die and more babies start the last stage of their journey into this world at that particular hour than at any other. It’s the witching hour. It’s the best time for an ambush, for a raid.
Most mornings, just before daybreak, I would sneak next door to the Birkenbach’s farm, into their hay barn, lift a loose board and squeeze into the adjacent chicken coop. The chickens, of course, would go berserk. You had to be quick, grab three or four eggs, strew some bits of carnivore hair about and get the hell out before one of the Birkenbachs, usually the missus, showed up to catch the thief. My father’s fox and badger pelts began to look pretty ratty. They never caught me. They did complain to my father about the foxes and badgers that regularly seemed to raid their chicken coop and asked him to shoot them. He told them that he was not allowed to carry a gun by order of the allied military government and couldn’t help them.
We ate eggs for breakfast and no one asked me to explain the origin of those eggs. My father had misgivings and I once overheard him talking to my mother about it and asking her where she got eggs almost every day, since he knew she was not on speaking terms with the Birkenbachs. My mother told him to enjoy his breakfast and not to worry, that God was providing.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Waste Not, Want Not
Recycling, refreshing and re-using are very popular subjects on Saturna and are taken very seriously by some, if recent issues of the Scribbler can be trusted. You sometimes get the feeling that this is some dark religious cult or that we are headed for some cataclysmic event, if we don’t re-use those tiny bits of left-over soap or, God forbid, toss out an old sock that has seen better days. Though, come to think of it, there are very practical and beneficial uses for old socks. I will try to address that topic in a later issue.
A more light-hearted look at recycling in another time and place might be a good idea. Recycling is, of course, not new to our age today. I remember a time some 60 years ago when people had to be resourceful and find new applications for things that had outlived their original usefulness. This was part of our common survival strategy. This was long before I crossed to the enlightened shores of North America. This was when I still lived on the dark side, in post-war Germany.
The year was 1946 and refugees from the lost eastern German territories were flooding across the border between east and west. One of those refugees lived on the second floor of our house in one of our guest rooms. His name was Hans Spiess (pronounced shpees) and he came from some place in Czechoslovakia or as he called it, the Protectorate. He was a heavy smoker and he was suffering, because cigarettes were a luxury and he didn’t have any. This was also in the days before filters were the norm. His fingers were nicotine-stained and he held his cigarettes in a very peculiar way between his thumb and forefinger of his right hand, with the burning end up. To take a puff, this meant that he had to twist his hand awkwardly, palm up. It looked odd, foreign, to us. He spent his days crouched behind his second floor window, watching the proceedings in the street below, a pair of army-issue binoculars at his side, particularly when there were American soldiers about, who were known as great wastrels as well as benefactors. They would light a cigarette, take a couple of hits and toss it on the ground.
When that happened, Herr Spiess would rush downstairs and out into the street to where the treasure had been carelessly flicked. He didn’t like Americans and thought of them as slackers. He didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing that he was after their half-smoked stubs. He also didn’t want to let those butts burn uselessly down to the end on the ground. Speed was of the essence. So, to camouflage his true intentions, he had worked a short darning needle into the heel of his boot with its pointed end protruding in back. He would quick-march over to where the errant smoke lay in the dirt, surreptitiously spike it with his boot-heel needle as he walked past, bring his heel up to where he could reach it with his hands without bending over too much, palm the butt, put out the embers and return to his lair. You had to give him credit; he was pretty good at this maneuver. However, his hands were always covered with plasters, where he’d stuck himself with his cigarette-butt-retrieval-needle. In the evening, he would sit down with his stash of half-smoked cigarette butts, meticulously strip them and roll them into thin new cigarettes. Sometimes, there was enough for quite a few of his recycled hand-rolled smokes. He figured five normal sized American butts equaled one new cigarette. He never shared with anyone and guarded his stash jealously.
My older brother, also a heavy smoker, had a different method of recycling cigarettes. He persuaded me to be his gofer in his battle with Herr Spiess over supremacy in the cigarette-butt-retrieval war. Whenever anyone showed up who smoked, it was my job to hover unobtrusively nearby and retrieve their leftovers. I was very good at this task, picking up butts, emptying ashtrays and shadowing the Americans to beat Herr Spiess to the prize. Several times Herr Spiess threatened me with severe consequences, if I didn’t cease and desist. I laughed at him, because I knew he was afraid of my brother, who had told him that if he so much as laid a finger on me, he would put a large hole in him.
On rare occasions, some GI would carelessly leave a half smoked pack of Lucky Strikes or Camels laying around, giving me the opportunity to sneak in under the radar and swipe them. These were like gold to my brother, because you could trade them for whatever you needed, whether it was food or booze or gasoline or nylons. American cigarettes were the unofficial currency of Germany in the years after the end of the war and would buy you just about anything.
My brother stretched these pickings I brought him with an assorted mix of boysenberry leaves and elephant ear, also called hoof lettuce, a giant-leafed, horseshoe-shaped, hairy weed which grew in moist ditches along roadways all around our village. These leaves were carefully spread out to dry on the floor of our attic and then meticulously cut and mixed with the stripped tobacco I had collected and rolled into new cigarettes. My brother used whatever paper was handy, including newsprint, for rolling papers.
My brother could roll cigarettes with one hand. He could also light matches with one hand. Obviously, his three-year war experience had been good for something. He always carried a handful of cigarettes loose in his pocket. He never threw a cigarette away, but smoked it down to the last crumb of tobacco. His fingertips and the cup of his right hand were stained dark brown. He had the soldier’s habit of cupping his smokes in his hand to avoid giving himself away to the enemy or superiors.
He told me that this mixture of his tasted better than the cheap Russian makhorkas he had smoked during the war. And, he added, you didn’t have to hold them up vertically to keep the tobacco from falling out, as you apparently had to with the Russian smokes, because that tobacco was dry and stale, loosely packed and full of sweepings. As any real smoker knows, dried out tobacco can be a bitch and can interfere with the enjoyment of the act of smoking. You had to hold them awkwardly and if you weren’t careful, you burned your fingers.
By relating this story, I don’t want to entice anybody to pick up smoking or praise the filthy habit in any way. It is simply an example of re-use, driven by necessity, in another time entirely. But all the same, the next time you espy an abandoned cigarette butt under foot, you’ll know what to do. Waste not, want not. Nowadays, the problem, of course, is what to do with the filters. I’m working on that.
In future issues, I will endeavor to familiarize you with ways to overcome a total lack of toilet paper, how to extend the lifespan of paper towels and give you an example of how the creative use of a wool sock can dissuade trespassers from your property.
A more light-hearted look at recycling in another time and place might be a good idea. Recycling is, of course, not new to our age today. I remember a time some 60 years ago when people had to be resourceful and find new applications for things that had outlived their original usefulness. This was part of our common survival strategy. This was long before I crossed to the enlightened shores of North America. This was when I still lived on the dark side, in post-war Germany.
The year was 1946 and refugees from the lost eastern German territories were flooding across the border between east and west. One of those refugees lived on the second floor of our house in one of our guest rooms. His name was Hans Spiess (pronounced shpees) and he came from some place in Czechoslovakia or as he called it, the Protectorate. He was a heavy smoker and he was suffering, because cigarettes were a luxury and he didn’t have any. This was also in the days before filters were the norm. His fingers were nicotine-stained and he held his cigarettes in a very peculiar way between his thumb and forefinger of his right hand, with the burning end up. To take a puff, this meant that he had to twist his hand awkwardly, palm up. It looked odd, foreign, to us. He spent his days crouched behind his second floor window, watching the proceedings in the street below, a pair of army-issue binoculars at his side, particularly when there were American soldiers about, who were known as great wastrels as well as benefactors. They would light a cigarette, take a couple of hits and toss it on the ground.
When that happened, Herr Spiess would rush downstairs and out into the street to where the treasure had been carelessly flicked. He didn’t like Americans and thought of them as slackers. He didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing that he was after their half-smoked stubs. He also didn’t want to let those butts burn uselessly down to the end on the ground. Speed was of the essence. So, to camouflage his true intentions, he had worked a short darning needle into the heel of his boot with its pointed end protruding in back. He would quick-march over to where the errant smoke lay in the dirt, surreptitiously spike it with his boot-heel needle as he walked past, bring his heel up to where he could reach it with his hands without bending over too much, palm the butt, put out the embers and return to his lair. You had to give him credit; he was pretty good at this maneuver. However, his hands were always covered with plasters, where he’d stuck himself with his cigarette-butt-retrieval-needle. In the evening, he would sit down with his stash of half-smoked cigarette butts, meticulously strip them and roll them into thin new cigarettes. Sometimes, there was enough for quite a few of his recycled hand-rolled smokes. He figured five normal sized American butts equaled one new cigarette. He never shared with anyone and guarded his stash jealously.
My older brother, also a heavy smoker, had a different method of recycling cigarettes. He persuaded me to be his gofer in his battle with Herr Spiess over supremacy in the cigarette-butt-retrieval war. Whenever anyone showed up who smoked, it was my job to hover unobtrusively nearby and retrieve their leftovers. I was very good at this task, picking up butts, emptying ashtrays and shadowing the Americans to beat Herr Spiess to the prize. Several times Herr Spiess threatened me with severe consequences, if I didn’t cease and desist. I laughed at him, because I knew he was afraid of my brother, who had told him that if he so much as laid a finger on me, he would put a large hole in him.
On rare occasions, some GI would carelessly leave a half smoked pack of Lucky Strikes or Camels laying around, giving me the opportunity to sneak in under the radar and swipe them. These were like gold to my brother, because you could trade them for whatever you needed, whether it was food or booze or gasoline or nylons. American cigarettes were the unofficial currency of Germany in the years after the end of the war and would buy you just about anything.
My brother stretched these pickings I brought him with an assorted mix of boysenberry leaves and elephant ear, also called hoof lettuce, a giant-leafed, horseshoe-shaped, hairy weed which grew in moist ditches along roadways all around our village. These leaves were carefully spread out to dry on the floor of our attic and then meticulously cut and mixed with the stripped tobacco I had collected and rolled into new cigarettes. My brother used whatever paper was handy, including newsprint, for rolling papers.
My brother could roll cigarettes with one hand. He could also light matches with one hand. Obviously, his three-year war experience had been good for something. He always carried a handful of cigarettes loose in his pocket. He never threw a cigarette away, but smoked it down to the last crumb of tobacco. His fingertips and the cup of his right hand were stained dark brown. He had the soldier’s habit of cupping his smokes in his hand to avoid giving himself away to the enemy or superiors.
He told me that this mixture of his tasted better than the cheap Russian makhorkas he had smoked during the war. And, he added, you didn’t have to hold them up vertically to keep the tobacco from falling out, as you apparently had to with the Russian smokes, because that tobacco was dry and stale, loosely packed and full of sweepings. As any real smoker knows, dried out tobacco can be a bitch and can interfere with the enjoyment of the act of smoking. You had to hold them awkwardly and if you weren’t careful, you burned your fingers.
By relating this story, I don’t want to entice anybody to pick up smoking or praise the filthy habit in any way. It is simply an example of re-use, driven by necessity, in another time entirely. But all the same, the next time you espy an abandoned cigarette butt under foot, you’ll know what to do. Waste not, want not. Nowadays, the problem, of course, is what to do with the filters. I’m working on that.
In future issues, I will endeavor to familiarize you with ways to overcome a total lack of toilet paper, how to extend the lifespan of paper towels and give you an example of how the creative use of a wool sock can dissuade trespassers from your property.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Alpo And Other Savory Delicacies
I sincerely hope that you tried and enjoyed my lung pie recipe featured in last month’s installment. I realize that savory treat may not be high on some folks’ list of favorites, but I also know that once you gagged it down, you’ll never forget its taste. I am equally sure that you’ll think twice now before discarding deer innards or tossing sheep and goat guts or road kill to the eagles or the ravens.
Thinking about lung pie brings to mind another mouth-watering dish that I’d like to share with you, this one from my university days. Five of us - two Costa Rican exchange students from San Jose, a pre-med student from Salina, Kansas, a freshman from the south side of Chicago and me, a veteran with limited language skills - were living in Mrs. Lynch’s basement on Vermont Street in Lawrence, Kansas, a block off campus. The two Costa Ricans were on scholarship, the rest of us had to work to go to school. Needless to say, we had limited resources.
Mrs. Lynch, a widow in her sixties, lived on the first floor and guarded with a zealot’s zeal the approaches to the second floor, which was shared by eight co-eds. The only way up there without being spotted by Mrs. Lynch was up a rickety pear trellis against the back wall of the house. This was a dangerous climb, because the house was built into the side of Mt. Oread, a steep flat-topped hill, 191 feet above the surrounding city of Lawrence, with the campus of the University of Kansas taking up the top. Mrs. Lynch’s backyard fell away steeply from the back of the house. If you tumbled off the trellis, you had a ways to go before you came to a stop.
If you’re into trivia, here are a couple of tidbits about Mt Oread. Originally called Hogback Ridge, Mt. Oread was named after Oread Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts, and was the staging area for William Quantrill’s infamous raid into Lawrence on August 21, 1863. It sits on the water divide between the Kaw and Wakarusa Rivers and offers one of the finest views in Kansas.
Living in that basement was an adventure. For one, we had a bit of a rodent problem. Our pre-med roommate – his name was Carleton Wedell – believed in sanitation and each night he’d lay out mouse poison in the kitchen. The poison didn’t turn out to be fatal, because the next morning there always seemed to be three or four dazed mice running in circles around the legs of the kitchen table. Carleton had a BB-gun, but he was a lousy shot and he could never hit the groggy mice, so it fell to me to take over the daily task of shooting the vermin before breakfast. I’d put a chair in the doorway between the kitchen and our common room to block the little buggers’ obvious escape route, sat down on it and picked them off, one by one. Even in their impaired condition, these mice were pretty skittish and BBs ricocheted off the kitchen surfaces. Mrs. Lynch kept complaining about the dings in her appliances, but we didn’t tell her about the kitchen’s alternate use as a rifle range.
Another thing I learned in Mrs. Lynch’s basement was the fact that Alpo could be considered comfort food, if you’re hungry. It didn’t taste bad, as long as you put lots of pepper and ketchup on it and washed it down with plenty of fluids of your choosing. The trick was to put the can of Alpo in the fridge overnight. This led to a slight contraction of the can’s contents, so that you could extract the mess the next morning in one cylindrical piece. This overnight cooling made it cohesive and gave it the consistency of aspic, kind of jiggly. You then sliced it into slabs about an inch thick and fried them. The slices looked like hamburger patties. We all ate them, except pre-med Carleton. He thought eating dog food was disgusting. But I don’t think he had ever been truly famished in his life. Besides sharing is a good thing, just don’t let your dog know you’re gagging down his food. He or she might take exception.
To pay for Mrs. Lynch’s basement and my university tuition, I got a summer job as a house painter with the university works department. I spent a hot Kansas summer painting married student quarters. I was the tallest in the crew, so I got the chore of painting ceilings. I discovered new muscles in my neck, shoulders and back that I didn’t realize I had.
One of my co-workers was a black guy named Earl Ladd. He lived on the edge of Lawrence along the Kaw River. He invited me to a barbecue at his house one Saturday in July. When I showed up, I was the only white face in sight. I didn’t care and they treated me like one of theirs. Most of them were veterans like me and I spoke their language. Fried catfish and ‘coon were the highlights of the menu. The raccoon was roasted whole on a spit and was dripping with grease. You ate it with mashed sweet potatoes and corn on the cob. I think they were trying to see how the white boy handled a leg of ‘coon. If they thought I would balk at chowing down on their offering, they got the wrong guy. I gagged it down. We washed it down with home brew that came in great big metal buckets. Everyone just dipped their glass or cup in there for refills. The beer had quite a kick. I think they tried to get me drunk, but my long and intimate experience with Bavarian beer helped me persevere. It was a party.
They say raccoon tastes like chicken. I don’t know if I’d go along with that assessment. To me it tasted more like badger. Or perhaps porcupine, without the bitter hemlock or cedar aftertaste. I’ve tried both, though not barbecued badger. That always came in a stew. I remember some years ago at my cottage in the Haliburton Highlands, north of Toronto, my friends and I were barbecuing a porcupine. It had made the mistake of chewing through the brake-line of my wife’s Toyota Tercel. When that happened, I received orders to shoot and kill the miscreant, which I did. But I thought it wasteful to just toss the remains aside and leave them for the wolves.
To barbecue a porcupine, you first have to skin it – very carefully. Porcupine quills are not fun to remove, as anyone who’s ever had to pull them out of their dog’s muzzle can attest. My friends and I were pretty much into the beer and in the bag by then and we were busy basting the porcupine with President’s Choice Memories of Saigon barbecue sauce, when my neighbor, Mrs. Griffin, walked over, asking if we had seen her dog, a miniature Schnauzer. My friend Tim lifted the lid of the barbecue and asked her: “Was it grey?” Needless to say, Mrs. Griffin was not impressed. She was aghast and didn’t think the gag was at all funny. Maybe not.
I should have known that talking about food would get me sidetracked. I guess we’ll have to tackle the recipe for making tasty alcoholic beverages out of Coca Cola and common household fluids, like aftershave lotion, lighter fluid and gasoline in a later installment. Here is a hint: the trick is the proper proportion.
Thinking about lung pie brings to mind another mouth-watering dish that I’d like to share with you, this one from my university days. Five of us - two Costa Rican exchange students from San Jose, a pre-med student from Salina, Kansas, a freshman from the south side of Chicago and me, a veteran with limited language skills - were living in Mrs. Lynch’s basement on Vermont Street in Lawrence, Kansas, a block off campus. The two Costa Ricans were on scholarship, the rest of us had to work to go to school. Needless to say, we had limited resources.
Mrs. Lynch, a widow in her sixties, lived on the first floor and guarded with a zealot’s zeal the approaches to the second floor, which was shared by eight co-eds. The only way up there without being spotted by Mrs. Lynch was up a rickety pear trellis against the back wall of the house. This was a dangerous climb, because the house was built into the side of Mt. Oread, a steep flat-topped hill, 191 feet above the surrounding city of Lawrence, with the campus of the University of Kansas taking up the top. Mrs. Lynch’s backyard fell away steeply from the back of the house. If you tumbled off the trellis, you had a ways to go before you came to a stop.
If you’re into trivia, here are a couple of tidbits about Mt Oread. Originally called Hogback Ridge, Mt. Oread was named after Oread Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts, and was the staging area for William Quantrill’s infamous raid into Lawrence on August 21, 1863. It sits on the water divide between the Kaw and Wakarusa Rivers and offers one of the finest views in Kansas.
Living in that basement was an adventure. For one, we had a bit of a rodent problem. Our pre-med roommate – his name was Carleton Wedell – believed in sanitation and each night he’d lay out mouse poison in the kitchen. The poison didn’t turn out to be fatal, because the next morning there always seemed to be three or four dazed mice running in circles around the legs of the kitchen table. Carleton had a BB-gun, but he was a lousy shot and he could never hit the groggy mice, so it fell to me to take over the daily task of shooting the vermin before breakfast. I’d put a chair in the doorway between the kitchen and our common room to block the little buggers’ obvious escape route, sat down on it and picked them off, one by one. Even in their impaired condition, these mice were pretty skittish and BBs ricocheted off the kitchen surfaces. Mrs. Lynch kept complaining about the dings in her appliances, but we didn’t tell her about the kitchen’s alternate use as a rifle range.
Another thing I learned in Mrs. Lynch’s basement was the fact that Alpo could be considered comfort food, if you’re hungry. It didn’t taste bad, as long as you put lots of pepper and ketchup on it and washed it down with plenty of fluids of your choosing. The trick was to put the can of Alpo in the fridge overnight. This led to a slight contraction of the can’s contents, so that you could extract the mess the next morning in one cylindrical piece. This overnight cooling made it cohesive and gave it the consistency of aspic, kind of jiggly. You then sliced it into slabs about an inch thick and fried them. The slices looked like hamburger patties. We all ate them, except pre-med Carleton. He thought eating dog food was disgusting. But I don’t think he had ever been truly famished in his life. Besides sharing is a good thing, just don’t let your dog know you’re gagging down his food. He or she might take exception.
To pay for Mrs. Lynch’s basement and my university tuition, I got a summer job as a house painter with the university works department. I spent a hot Kansas summer painting married student quarters. I was the tallest in the crew, so I got the chore of painting ceilings. I discovered new muscles in my neck, shoulders and back that I didn’t realize I had.
One of my co-workers was a black guy named Earl Ladd. He lived on the edge of Lawrence along the Kaw River. He invited me to a barbecue at his house one Saturday in July. When I showed up, I was the only white face in sight. I didn’t care and they treated me like one of theirs. Most of them were veterans like me and I spoke their language. Fried catfish and ‘coon were the highlights of the menu. The raccoon was roasted whole on a spit and was dripping with grease. You ate it with mashed sweet potatoes and corn on the cob. I think they were trying to see how the white boy handled a leg of ‘coon. If they thought I would balk at chowing down on their offering, they got the wrong guy. I gagged it down. We washed it down with home brew that came in great big metal buckets. Everyone just dipped their glass or cup in there for refills. The beer had quite a kick. I think they tried to get me drunk, but my long and intimate experience with Bavarian beer helped me persevere. It was a party.
They say raccoon tastes like chicken. I don’t know if I’d go along with that assessment. To me it tasted more like badger. Or perhaps porcupine, without the bitter hemlock or cedar aftertaste. I’ve tried both, though not barbecued badger. That always came in a stew. I remember some years ago at my cottage in the Haliburton Highlands, north of Toronto, my friends and I were barbecuing a porcupine. It had made the mistake of chewing through the brake-line of my wife’s Toyota Tercel. When that happened, I received orders to shoot and kill the miscreant, which I did. But I thought it wasteful to just toss the remains aside and leave them for the wolves.
To barbecue a porcupine, you first have to skin it – very carefully. Porcupine quills are not fun to remove, as anyone who’s ever had to pull them out of their dog’s muzzle can attest. My friends and I were pretty much into the beer and in the bag by then and we were busy basting the porcupine with President’s Choice Memories of Saigon barbecue sauce, when my neighbor, Mrs. Griffin, walked over, asking if we had seen her dog, a miniature Schnauzer. My friend Tim lifted the lid of the barbecue and asked her: “Was it grey?” Needless to say, Mrs. Griffin was not impressed. She was aghast and didn’t think the gag was at all funny. Maybe not.
I should have known that talking about food would get me sidetracked. I guess we’ll have to tackle the recipe for making tasty alcoholic beverages out of Coca Cola and common household fluids, like aftershave lotion, lighter fluid and gasoline in a later installment. Here is a hint: the trick is the proper proportion.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Stuff My Uncle Sam Taught Me
I joined my Uncle Sam’s Army when I was 20 years old and fresh off the boat from the fatherland. I could not speak English. Well, I did know four words – yes, no, thank you and f—k off. So it may not come as a surprise to you, that I encountered some problems communicating with my betters in the early days of my indenture.
The first thing my Uncle Sam taught me is that every action or inaction has a consequence. I was familiar with the physics axiom that every action generates a reaction, but I didn’t realize that this rule also applied to the military. My Uncle Sam’s Army was very high on cleanliness, neatness and, of course, order and he believed in issuing demerit points, gigs, we called them, if you didn’t measure up to his high standards. If your boots were not spit-shined or your belt buckle polished to your platoon sergeant’s high expectation, you could look forward to policing the parade ground for cigarette butts or cleaning the barracks latrine after everyone else had gone off duty. If you overlooked some dust particles on the mantel over the door during an inspection of your quarters, you could expect to spend hours in the mess cleaning pots and pans and being the cooks’ flunky. If, God forbid, there was dirt or rust on your rifle, you were guaranteed hours of extra drill on the parade ground with full field pack and your rifle at port arms, while your buddies slept.
The second thing my Uncle Sam taught me is that it is beneficial to obey orders, no matter how stupid they may seem to you. When a superior in those early days called me to attention and gave me an order, my lack of understanding and vocabulary sometimes was quite a nuisance. I learned quickly that f—k off was not a good answer, even though it entertained my fellow recruits greatly. It took me about six months to get a bit of a handle on the King’s English. Then I saw the light. I learned that the best response to an order, no matter what, was “Yes, sir” and then make sure your butt was below the horizon, to avoid getting it shot off. This insight served me well.
The third thing my Uncle Sam taught me was to never volunteer. If you volunteered, the chances of getting your butt shot off increased exponentially while your buddies were back in camp relaxing and sucking back Budweisers.
My Uncle Sam taught me how to shoot neat stuff – rifles, pistols, machine guns, BARs, bazookas, 120mm tank guns. And, if you were good at it, this earned you privileges. Like, if you were good with a machine gun – and I was pretty good – you got to go out by yourself to an exposed position and become the target of all the guys on the other side, who were trying to kill you, before you did them in.
My Uncle Sam taught me how to drive stick, how to drive a deuce-and-a-half and a Sherman tank. He taught me how to fly an airplane. All pretty useful skills. But he also taught me how to blow up stuff and I haven’t found a good use for that skill yet.
My Uncle Sam taught me that vodka is a great soother of both mental and physical pain and that Aqua Velva filtered through your gasmask charcoal filter and mixed with Coke will give you a pretty good jolt. The consumption of alcohol sometimes had bizarre repercussions, like the time two of my buddies and I tried to milk a cow, but hit on a bull instead, due to our blurred vision. Bulls don’t like to be milked.
My Uncle Sam taught me to avoid the company of bible thumpers and square-headed butt clenchers at all cost, because they had a tendency to be heroes and get you involved in their foolish quests for glory. If you wanted to survive, it was better to be invisible then to charge headlong into disaster.
My Uncle Sam taught me to treat my rifle like my bride, to love her, clean her, even sleep with her. I never had a bride, so this was new to me. He also insisted that you treat this bride vigorously, like in closed order drills, where you had to slap her and jerk her this way and that, to twirl her in the air, to thump her onto the ground with resolve, in unison with your mates. Perhaps that explains my initial awkwardness and difficulties when I did find a real bride later.
My Uncle Sam taught me that everything is done better in a group, like marching, eating, sleeping, tending to your bodily functions. If you did not adhere to this policy, there were always ramifications, none of them pleasant. Those of you who have ever dug a regulation latrine trench know whereof I’m speaking.
My Uncle Sam taught me how to kill. He taught me to do this without a second thought, without remorse. He taught me that the only thing that mattered was the man standing at the end. He didn’t teach me how to deal with the aftermath, the nightmares.
The first thing my Uncle Sam taught me is that every action or inaction has a consequence. I was familiar with the physics axiom that every action generates a reaction, but I didn’t realize that this rule also applied to the military. My Uncle Sam’s Army was very high on cleanliness, neatness and, of course, order and he believed in issuing demerit points, gigs, we called them, if you didn’t measure up to his high standards. If your boots were not spit-shined or your belt buckle polished to your platoon sergeant’s high expectation, you could look forward to policing the parade ground for cigarette butts or cleaning the barracks latrine after everyone else had gone off duty. If you overlooked some dust particles on the mantel over the door during an inspection of your quarters, you could expect to spend hours in the mess cleaning pots and pans and being the cooks’ flunky. If, God forbid, there was dirt or rust on your rifle, you were guaranteed hours of extra drill on the parade ground with full field pack and your rifle at port arms, while your buddies slept.
The second thing my Uncle Sam taught me is that it is beneficial to obey orders, no matter how stupid they may seem to you. When a superior in those early days called me to attention and gave me an order, my lack of understanding and vocabulary sometimes was quite a nuisance. I learned quickly that f—k off was not a good answer, even though it entertained my fellow recruits greatly. It took me about six months to get a bit of a handle on the King’s English. Then I saw the light. I learned that the best response to an order, no matter what, was “Yes, sir” and then make sure your butt was below the horizon, to avoid getting it shot off. This insight served me well.
The third thing my Uncle Sam taught me was to never volunteer. If you volunteered, the chances of getting your butt shot off increased exponentially while your buddies were back in camp relaxing and sucking back Budweisers.
My Uncle Sam taught me how to shoot neat stuff – rifles, pistols, machine guns, BARs, bazookas, 120mm tank guns. And, if you were good at it, this earned you privileges. Like, if you were good with a machine gun – and I was pretty good – you got to go out by yourself to an exposed position and become the target of all the guys on the other side, who were trying to kill you, before you did them in.
My Uncle Sam taught me how to drive stick, how to drive a deuce-and-a-half and a Sherman tank. He taught me how to fly an airplane. All pretty useful skills. But he also taught me how to blow up stuff and I haven’t found a good use for that skill yet.
My Uncle Sam taught me that vodka is a great soother of both mental and physical pain and that Aqua Velva filtered through your gasmask charcoal filter and mixed with Coke will give you a pretty good jolt. The consumption of alcohol sometimes had bizarre repercussions, like the time two of my buddies and I tried to milk a cow, but hit on a bull instead, due to our blurred vision. Bulls don’t like to be milked.
My Uncle Sam taught me to avoid the company of bible thumpers and square-headed butt clenchers at all cost, because they had a tendency to be heroes and get you involved in their foolish quests for glory. If you wanted to survive, it was better to be invisible then to charge headlong into disaster.
My Uncle Sam taught me to treat my rifle like my bride, to love her, clean her, even sleep with her. I never had a bride, so this was new to me. He also insisted that you treat this bride vigorously, like in closed order drills, where you had to slap her and jerk her this way and that, to twirl her in the air, to thump her onto the ground with resolve, in unison with your mates. Perhaps that explains my initial awkwardness and difficulties when I did find a real bride later.
My Uncle Sam taught me that everything is done better in a group, like marching, eating, sleeping, tending to your bodily functions. If you did not adhere to this policy, there were always ramifications, none of them pleasant. Those of you who have ever dug a regulation latrine trench know whereof I’m speaking.
My Uncle Sam taught me how to kill. He taught me to do this without a second thought, without remorse. He taught me that the only thing that mattered was the man standing at the end. He didn’t teach me how to deal with the aftermath, the nightmares.
Monday, May 5, 2008
On Political Correctness
My man, Charlton Heston, called it the “tyranny of manners.” He was talking about the obsession with political correctness of the self-anointed, morally superior, sensitive and compassionate elite, a type of censorship that is only applied to subjects near and dear to this vociferous left-leaning fringe.
Interestingly, the idea of political correctness is a German invention, developed in the 1920’s by the “Frankfurt School,” a group of progressive thinkers, who were trying to help to spread the Bolshevik Revolution into the rest of Europe. The obstacle, as they saw it, was Western Civilization and its belief in the primacy of the individual and not the group. To achieve their goal of advancing the revolution, they decided that western society’s speech and thought patterns had to be changed by putting about the idea that vocalizing your beliefs was disrespectful to others and must be avoided, in order to make up for past inequities. And it was important to call it something that sounded positive: ”Political Correctness.” George Orwell grasped this concept perfectly.
This infatuation with sensitivity has spread everywhere, particularly the media and post-modern literature. Advocates of political correctness try to homogenize our language, make it easy to be a victim. Terms like “culturally deprived” or “developmentally challenged” come to mind. If you aren’t successful in life, then it must be the fault of your race or gender. Truth is no longer absolute, but simply one perspective offered by a particular group to promote its own interest.
It is a language that leaves common sense at the door. It speaks in platitudes and feel-good euphemisms. It uses words which obfuscate, cloak and obliterate reality. If you do not fall in line, you are marginalized as a died-in-the-wool reactionary, bigot or redneck. I sometimes feel we have returned to the days of the Spanish Inquisition or the star chamber.
I recently wrote a story that touched on the subject of rape of countless German women by Red Army soldiers in 1945. It is a documented fact of history and it was part of the price of the Germans’ defeat. I happened to live there at the time. Rape and death and destruction were a normal part of our everyday life. I tried to put a light-hearted spin on a terrible story. I was told that this was offensive, that rape was a subject that must not be treated lightly. I agree, but back then it was part of the booty of victory. Rape occurred every day and no one in the West objected, because they were afraid of Uncle Joe’s displeasure. Would they object today? I doubt it. If the soldiers were American, perhaps. After all, they are today’s evil empire.
I admit that I am politically incorrect. Mea maxima culpa. Maybe it’s my age. I simply don’t care if anyone thinks I’m a reactionary or a dinosaur. Whatever. This is a free country and everyone is entitled to their truths. It is ok, if you don’t agree with me. That’s your right. Just don’t tell me what I should do or think. If I am factually wrong, show me the error of my ways. I will admit my shortcomings. It is human to err.
Interestingly, the idea of political correctness is a German invention, developed in the 1920’s by the “Frankfurt School,” a group of progressive thinkers, who were trying to help to spread the Bolshevik Revolution into the rest of Europe. The obstacle, as they saw it, was Western Civilization and its belief in the primacy of the individual and not the group. To achieve their goal of advancing the revolution, they decided that western society’s speech and thought patterns had to be changed by putting about the idea that vocalizing your beliefs was disrespectful to others and must be avoided, in order to make up for past inequities. And it was important to call it something that sounded positive: ”Political Correctness.” George Orwell grasped this concept perfectly.
This infatuation with sensitivity has spread everywhere, particularly the media and post-modern literature. Advocates of political correctness try to homogenize our language, make it easy to be a victim. Terms like “culturally deprived” or “developmentally challenged” come to mind. If you aren’t successful in life, then it must be the fault of your race or gender. Truth is no longer absolute, but simply one perspective offered by a particular group to promote its own interest.
It is a language that leaves common sense at the door. It speaks in platitudes and feel-good euphemisms. It uses words which obfuscate, cloak and obliterate reality. If you do not fall in line, you are marginalized as a died-in-the-wool reactionary, bigot or redneck. I sometimes feel we have returned to the days of the Spanish Inquisition or the star chamber.
I recently wrote a story that touched on the subject of rape of countless German women by Red Army soldiers in 1945. It is a documented fact of history and it was part of the price of the Germans’ defeat. I happened to live there at the time. Rape and death and destruction were a normal part of our everyday life. I tried to put a light-hearted spin on a terrible story. I was told that this was offensive, that rape was a subject that must not be treated lightly. I agree, but back then it was part of the booty of victory. Rape occurred every day and no one in the West objected, because they were afraid of Uncle Joe’s displeasure. Would they object today? I doubt it. If the soldiers were American, perhaps. After all, they are today’s evil empire.
I admit that I am politically incorrect. Mea maxima culpa. Maybe it’s my age. I simply don’t care if anyone thinks I’m a reactionary or a dinosaur. Whatever. This is a free country and everyone is entitled to their truths. It is ok, if you don’t agree with me. That’s your right. Just don’t tell me what I should do or think. If I am factually wrong, show me the error of my ways. I will admit my shortcomings. It is human to err.
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