Sunday, August 9, 2020

What a Small Pile of Receipts Told Me About a Father-Son Trip to Aspen

 

What Our Late Parents Leave Behind Can Tell Us Just How Much They Enjoyed Our Company

A receipt from a ski shop in Boulder
A receipt from a ski shop in Boulder

An unearthed paper trail tells a tale

A father-son trip more memorable to him than I knew

Parents can find ways to surprise you even when they are gone…have been gone for many years.

Case in point: In the process of going through family records and various documents to support a book I’m writing, I found a small stack of receipts and lined note paper with accounting notes that my father organized after a trip he and I took to Aspen, Colorado, in late March into early April 1969. He’d flown out to see me at school in Boulder, where we rented skis, boots, poles, and a roof rack for the rental car he’d picked up at the Denver airport.

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My father’s rental car receipt for the Aspen trip. Remember, these are 1969 prices

A former World War II fighter pilot and then a Strategic Air Command (SAC) bomber pilot, Pop was still on active duty in the Air Force, working at the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) across from the Pentagon. I was beginning my sophomore year at the University of Colorado, and, according to the receipts, I was living in the Baker Hall dorm on campus (room 181). The dates of the trip’s receipts fall just before my 20th birthday (May 5), and though I’d forgotten the timing of his visit, it appears to have been an early birthday present in the form of a father-son ski trip.

Why did he keep these particular records?

What I find fascinating and, frankly, quite emotionally tinged 17 years after his death in February, 2003, is that he kept these particular records for so many years. The trip was special to both of us for several reasons — more extensive than I’ll go into here — but it closed a loop of father-son trips he and I took.

Our road history began with a life-altering (for me) cross-country driving trip he and I took from Lincoln, Nebraska to Colorado Springs in May of 1963 (shortly after my 14th birthday) to compete in the Air Force skeet championships (we both won in our respective classes, and I still keep the little trophy I picked up from that journey).

Lessons from the driver’s seat

On that trip, my father kept the conversation going by describing the geology we were passing over and through as we made our way across the Great Plains and crossed into Colorado. He told me about the inland sea that covered much of the mid-North American continent, and pointed out the layers of rock exposed by the Interstate Highway builders as they cut through the rolling hills of western Nebraska.

After we slipped across the Colorado border, he pointed out the gentle rise of the terrain, and had me on the lookout for rocky outcrops jutting out of the ground paralleling the highway — they were the sentinels of the Front Range of the Rockies soon to appear as a soft white smudge on the horizon.

That first father-son road trip was part exploration, part education, part wonder, and part sharing; a long-distance drive that was all a fourteen-year-old kid could ever want.

Times and circumstances changed

Plans and adventures get shelved despite our best intentions

Jump forward six years from 1963 — turbulent years for the family as we left SAC in 1965 and moved back here to Virginia and tried to settle into a less peripatetic life that had been common to flight-status Air Force families. Among the routines that were set aside were our father-son trips which Pop’s Pentagon and IDA jobs — too classified for him to discuss, or for me to understand until I was much older.

I headed to Boulder in June of ’68 to get an early start at the University. I took up skiing again when the winter came. I say again, because during Pop’s tour of duty in Europe in the 1950s, the whole family did the skiing bit down in Switzerland and Austria. Once we came back to the U.S. in 1960, SAC had Pop stationed in non-mountainous states, so the family skiing came to a halt. Until pop flew to Colorado in the spring of ’69 ($47.25 from Baltimore to Denver. It seems he was able to use a military discount).

A bittersweet discovery in a small pile of papers

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My father’s final accounting for the Aspen trip

The receipts of the Aspen trip brought back the details I’d forgotten. We rented skis — K2s for me, Heads for him ($47.77 combined). We stayed at the Smuggler Lodge in Aspen (I remember going into the heated pool at night, with the outside temps still in the 30s and mist rising off the pool and our bodies as we swam)…and more memories unfolded as I went through each onion-skin-thin credit card receipt.

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View from one of the Aspen Mountain lifts. (photo by author)

The spring snow conditions were wonderful — Pop had never skied deep powder or basins — and we must have skied everything but the double diamonds ($140 lift tickets for two for the week). We ate at the Copper Kettle ($21.74), at the Chalet ($10.29), and at the Toklat restaurant on Main Street ($15.34).

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The Toklat restaurant in Aspen as it looked in 1962, seven years before my dad and I ate there (Aspen Historical Society photo)

Our trip was cut short after Pop took a fall on the upper slopes of Ajax Mountain, twisting his knees, and refusing (typically, maddeningly stoic) help from the Ski Patrol. The morning after the fall he was in pain and his knees were a mess, so I got him into the car and we drove back to Boulder. On his last night there, we had dinner at the Greenbriar Inn ($26.70).

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The Greenbriar Inn, Boulder, CO. (Photo from Greenbriar Inn)

The next morning, I drove him to Denver where he got the first plane back to DC ($47.25, Denver to Baltimore, according to the airline receipt). A bittersweet ending to a lovely, happy father-son trip.

My point, and I have one…

Anyway…the point of this little missive is to note that while it may seem like parents don’t always treasure every moment of their children’s lives, they can leave behind small treasures they held dear — albeit quietly — that reminded them of the good times they had. For me, it’s not just the Boulder-Aspen trip receipts that are examples of a father’s treasures.

A scrapbook recording a son’s early career

It wasn’t until after he died that I found a scrapbook he’d kept of all my early newspaper photos and stories. I never knew — he didn’t say a thing, just collected them and affixed them to the pages of the leather-bound album.

I’m sure my encounters with my dad’s collections of his son’s life and the times he and I shared are not unique — I’d be willing to bet that many of you have discovered similar personal treasures uncovered too late to talk about, but not too late to embrace and relive so many years later. Yep. They can still surprise you. Gotta love that.

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My dad and me on my wedding day in 1971, two years after the Aspen trip

Saturday, August 1, 2020

Comforting the Afflicted While Afflicting the Comfortable

Afflicting the Comfortable is This Writer’s Duty


Shutterstock
Shutterstock

Introducing Mr. Martin Dooley

In October, 1893, Chicago Evening Post journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne created a newspaper column written by the fictitious Irish bartender, Mr. Martin Dooley, a Dunne avatar whose jabs and barbs, witticisms and knife-edged humor skewered the political elite, and discomfited the socially well-to-do.

I first began reading Mr. Dooley’s 750-word columns when I was a teenager in high school here in Virginia in the late 1960s. As a kid raised by a mother whose biting editorial lashings took deadly aim at local politicians she accused of malpractice when it came to county politics, budgets, road maintenance, health care facilities, and various restrictive land-use ordinances, I appreciated to no end Mr. Dooley’s rotten-apple-coring observations written half-a-century before my birth.

Perhaps the most famous Dooleyism is this one, pulled from a larger paragraph, but nonetheless getting to the heart of what we as journalists see as our founding principle:

The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

A bit of cheek and the sting of skepticism

Now, in all fairness to accuracy of context, Dooley — and by inference, Dunne — was not exactly championing the news media of his day. The complete paragraph is this:

“Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward.”

If you think about it, if you give it a bit of a cynical 21st century spin, you could almost infer that Dooley/Dunne was speaking of the newspaper as Donald Trump might…as Steven Miller might…as Kayleigh McEneny might, as any number of high-profile conservative politicians and right-wing media heads might.

The media as the lie-spouting enemy

To the single-minded, one track, red-hat-wearing subculture of our society, Dooley had it right. In their minds, the newspapers — the mainstream news media in general — have taken control of the public’s right to think for themselves, to measure facts against hearsay, to judge right from wrong.

And if you were to interpret the whole of Dooley’s paragraph that way, you are likely falling for the gaslighting propaganda flowing out of the White House, the Senate, and the conservative media and right-wing MAGAphones that want you to think that way.

But that was not Dunne/Dooley’s point at all. Dooley was taking direct aim at just those people who believed that the media was corrupt, that newspapers lie, that editors were in cahoots with the Robber Barons and the power mongers.

Earning the public trust is hard but necessary

It is the job of journalists to get it right

What Dooley was getting at is that newspapers must earn the public trust by standing with the public against the winds of conceit and money and self-aggrandizing behavior and shameful politics.

Dooley’s satirical take on the media was nothing less than a reminder to reporters and editors that the true meaning of their work was to raise public awareness of the ills and lies being foisted on society by elected officials, the monied elite, the holier-than-thou preachers of eugenics, America First, the rape of the land, and corrupt government as in loco parentis.

In this time of an escalating pandemic, anemic Congressional diddling, unfathomably dangerous and unhinged presidential blather, race baiting, unwelcome and camouflaged federal police, science denying, intellect-shaming, environment gutting, and society-splitting behavior, the last hope Americans have to understand the full scope of the disasters facing us is a free and rigorously questioning news media.

One is never too old to write

Although I am no longer an active member of the credentialed media, I still consider myself a member of that profession as blogger, a writer for Medium, and a frequent poster (some would say, not incorrectly, a scold) on social media.

In this role as a writer on the periphery, a writer — a common citizen — I am no less attentive to the principles of journalistic comportment than I was when I was an active writer and photojournalist. I have watched with increasing alarm and profound sadness at the decline of political and social comity, which present, as physicians would say, with symptoms verging on systemic collapse.

America is in the ICU

The last thing we need is to be intubated for our failings

America is in an ICU, and we are not far from an intubation from which we may never recover.

Wanton ignorance of Covid-19’s merciless march across America (and the world); reckless regard for the heath of the young, the sick, the elderly, the immunocompromised, teachers, grandparents; and the economically squeezed single mothers and fathers (and grandparents acting as parents) who have little or no margins for personal distancing and no health care to speak of…the list of the vulnerable is long, and the list of the stupid and uncaring seems longer still.

Three diseases are infecting us

Statues of division

Statues representing a war and way of life some still see as a personal or generational loss of plantation entitlement are being torn down. And that is a good thing. But in that act of removal, those bronze icons of bellicose distinction and elevated reminders of enslavement are being replaced by extrajudicial posses of armed men and women whose irrighteous indignation at being marginalized by history has not been assuaged by the passage of time and the rise of a society that does not see things their way.

They wrap themselves in flags of irrelevance and sling bandoleers of bullets across their pride-swollen and pretend soldier chests. To what end? To intimidate? To protect us from ourselves? To remind Black America that the South could rise again? To work the will of an administration that is itself quite ready to deputize these roving bands of lost-cause misfits? I suspect some of all of the above applies.

The planet is warming.

I don’t need to cite statistics that are readily available to all who fear for Earth’s ability to sustain human activity. Most of us know that we have only the narrowest of windows in which to act to at least slow the oncoming heat storm and rising tides that threatens my grandchildren and their children…your children, your grandchildren. And yet, while the Earth burns and the waters flood our urban shores, our leaders dither and doubt, ignore or refute the science, and in their maddening reluctance to act, condemn us and our future kin to a hellish and desolate landscape surrounded by plundered and dying oceans.

The Congress

That collection of self-serving, tit-of-the-public-sucking alleged representatives of the people…is so engaged in partisan sneering, name-calling, and internecine warfare, that they are willing to settle for a Pyrrhic outcome rather than tend unselfishly to the needs of citizens for whom $600 per week means food on the table and some modicum of dignity when facing debt collectors. I worked on Capitol Hill long enough to see just how the pork is ground up and distributed to those with the loudest voices, and how the pigs’ snouts, tails, and entrails wind up on the plates of the most needy.

And so I wrote

With that point of view, exacerbated by the uptick in Trumpian tweets about ballot fraud, election delay, and doubt about the legitimacy of the election that will be held November 3, I penned a Facebook note in the late night hours of July 31, three short months before voters either head to the polls or mail in their ballots.

I wrote, “I’m not a violent man…but if I had but one wish, should tonight be my last night, I would wish for a mass die-off of all Trump supporters and all who don’t believe in masks. They are invasive weeds of ignorance, sycophancy, racism, and xenophobia, nothing more than kudzu-like species of the worst plants of mankind. No rational thought occupies their vacuous brains, no reasonable consideration for the mortality of their vulnerable neighbors — young and old — can move them off their ancient statues to lost causes. Their leader is a buffoon, a less than pitiable minor character in a play about fools and idiots. Be gone with them. Vote in November. In person if you can, but vote, vote, vote.

Swift reaction

To which several of my FB friends — surprised at the vehemence of my post — replied:

  • I’m sorry — I simply will not wish death on the people who attended the funeral of John Lewis and didn’t practice social distancing or wear a mask.
  • Jim — I have great respect for you, but in saying what you just posted, aren’t you becoming like them? Sorry to see.
  • I really wish people would stop saying this. They put other people in harm’s way too. Those people don’t deserve to die because of Trumpers ignorance.
  • I wish No One ill.

A measured response

Given these and some on-the-side messages questioning my moral center, I penned an explanatory note just to relieve my friends of the notion that I would countenance real harm to anyone.

If anything, my intent was to resurrect the spirit of Mr. Dooley and afflict those who are comfortable with the deterioration of life in American, and comfort those who still believe there is hope for us if we do the right thing…which begins with voting.

My Facebook post had nothing to do with John Lewis or his advocates — of which I am one. I watched every minute of his funeral, and most of the congregation did wear masks. For those who did not, I can only hope they will not test positive. But I hold no animus toward them.

My statement…my visceral reaction…is directed at those Trump followers and misguided people who cannot, will not, see what damage to the underlying fabric of basic social decency and democratic ideals writ large.

Not a death wish

Of course I don’t wish actual death on any person; I do however refuse to mourn for the selfish crowds who gather, maskless, in defiance of science, or for the individuals who have no conscience about exposing children, the elderly, the most vulnerable simply because they reject the medical evidence and adhere blindly to the childlike tantrums tweeted out from Trump.

Your right to vote for Trump does not entitle you to threaten my right to vote against him

There are millions of voters who support Trump, support to which they are completely entitled. I don’t quarrel with any American’s informed and measured political choice, and I won’t be drawn into an argument in which micro-distinctions are posited to prove the error of my initial observation. Of course there are Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, gays, deeply religious people, well-educated people, etc., who voted for Trump and who will vote for him again. Fine. That is their right.

Again, my anger, frustration, and dismay are focused on those Trump followers whose belief system is not self-informed and logically measured by fact, comparative analysis, and reason. Just because Trump or Steven Miller, or Hannity, or Carlson espouses some whackadoodle course of action, or demeans or casts doubt on scientists and physicians, does not mean their words are sacred.

Just because they continue to hold grudges against Hillary and Obama, or they simply dont like Joe Biden, is no excuse for putting people around them in jeopardy, or for espousing unsubstantiated medical treatments, or for pressing for schools to reopen in those communities where the risk of Covid-19 is still real.

The truth is not a shield against entrenched ignorance

I could go on with more examples of what I alone may believe are clear and present dangers to the country’s political foundation and operations But in doing so, I know that for every point I make, no matter how well founded in statistics, direct quotes, recorded actions, there will be a refutation thrown at me. There will be suggestions that I am simply a left wing, hyper progressive, sour-grapes advocate for Trump’s defeat. That is a sign that Trump is winning the battle for the hearts and minds of those who care nothing for facts and everything for a return to a Neolithic age of tribalism.

We are all frustrated and unsettled

My hyperbolic statement was rooted in a frustration and deep-seated fear that a portion of Trump followers, science deniers, far-right advocates of government overthrow, and irrational followers of fact-twisting conservative media darlings will find a way to supress or taint the 2020 election and tear asunder the already fragile fabric of our democracy.

An object lesson in the penalties for speaking truth

A school project meets administrative resistance

In 1967–68 at Wakefield high school here in Northern Virginia, I wrote and produced an 8mm film for English seminar titled A Whiter Shade of Black. It was about interracial dating, and it featured a few of our white and African American classmates. The film was my way of calling out the hatred and distrust and malign attitudes about the beauty of loving one another regardless of race.

In one particularly offensive (to the school’s administrators) scene, I had a white girl walk across the student quadrangle, holding hands with an African American male. I shot their walk from several angles, showing the faces of groups of students who were watching the couple. In one shot, the students who were watching, saw just the couple — a boy and a girl holding hands, looking happy. In another shot, the students saw the girl walking a black poodle on a long leash, and I’d directed those students to sneer and mouth profanities.

A dose of reality

I was called into the office shortly before the film was to be shown at an assembly and told it was not suitable for screening…it was too volatile. I was allowed to keep the A for my work, but the film itself never saw the light of day.

It was an admittedly heavy-handed way of bringing out the racial animosities that existed in the 1960s, and it succeeded inasmuch as it was banned by the administration. And this was at a school known for its liberal makeup and progressive curriculum.

Dooley is still right

My history as an advocate for civil and human and animal rights spans more than half a century. Over that time I have worked for House and Senate members of both parties, have worked for presidents and cabinet secretaries of both parties, voted for Rs and Ds and Independents.

I don’t take my right to vote for granted, any more than I took my multiple oaths as a civil servant for granted. I care deeply for the republic and for the vote, and when I see any movement that willfully, with malign intent, seeks to cast seeds of doubt among an already anxious electorate, I will call out those who are doing the gaslighting and trolling.

Martin Dooley’s advice to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable holds as true for me today as it did for Finley Peter Dunne in the 19th century. In my opinion, informed if by nothing other than my conscience, my job as an observer and chronicler of the 21st century scene is to speak the inconvenient truths, to turn over the slimy stones of politics, to call out the liars and charlatans who inhabit high offices or the back alleys of nonsensical farces, of which there are far too many in our country today.

Every person can do something, even if no one person can do everything. My something is speaking out and voting. And come November 3, I am confident that I will be joined by millions of my fellow Americans who will not be dissuaded from exercising the most important right we have.

Just because you are insignificant does not mean you don’t have a voice

I am an inconsequential person…I reach so few people as to be nothing more than decimal dust statistically speaking. I have always been an inconsequential person, fortunate enough to have worked for people who tried to make a difference — but they did not really need me for that; I was just a handy choice, a conveniently skilled tool.

Most of my friends are far better educated, far more articulate and talented, far better acquainted with the goings on of our society. I just happen to be a writer, influenced by a family of writers and writers who were really good at passing along their passion to me.

So, yes, I am hard on myself because what I have to offer is of little use, but I offer it anyway because I want to live William Faulkner’s dream for humanity, put this way in his 1950 Nobel Prize speech:

“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”.