https://dev.shakespearesmonkeys.com/section-555-stories-from-my-life en 2005-2012 shakespearesmonekys@gmail.com 42.65593 -71.33391 Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:41:57 GMT yacs http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 70 https://dev.shakespearesmonkeys.com/article-8021-sinnamahoning-in-october https://dev.shakespearesmonkeys.com/article-8021-sinnamahoning-in-october I was in the car with my parents. I was young, maybe seven or eight. We were going north for a long, fall weekend. The trees had turned, and the beauty was difficult to take in. I remember the fronts of stores that were colored like the leaves- reds and yellows. It seemed that whatever they sold in those places must have been wonderful, for the fronts of the buildings shimmered in the October air, colors hanging just above the surface, unreal and stunning. We labored away in our car toward our camp near Sinnamahoning. Each mile closer was part of a fragile promise that we would make it. The old, blue Plymouth had seen better days, but somehow it got us there. My sister and I, our father and mother, our dog, Smokey. We poured out into the cool, wet air, there among the ash, birches, and maples. I would spend the weekend gathering leaves and my mother would iron them between sheets of waxed paper. There were streams as cold as forever. If you put your bare feet into the water, they would ache awfully for a few minutes. The dog lapped from every rill, as if she was obliged to put her nose into each noisy, little stream. One time she saw a native brook trout before I did and jumped directly into a pool after it. When we got back to the camp, my father made me dry her off, and then she stretched in front of the iron stove until her fur was almost too hot to touch. At night I always tried in vain to stay awake and listen for bears. I wanted to see a bear more than almost anything does in the world. I fought sleep, sat up and created thoughts that taxed my mind, listened until it hurt, and found myself waking to the thin light of October morning, the camp full of breakfast coffee. I never saw a bear. It was the only thing amiss up there in the woods.                                       _____ I kept my ironed leaves under the couch when we got home. I took them out after the first snowfall and laid them out carefully on our snow-covered porch. The reds and yellows and oranges sang like a song on that white blessing. I remember them being so beautiful that I almost cried. (Sinnamahoning is a small town in North Central Pennsylvania built on the site of an old Seneca Indian village of the same name.) ... more norm Stories From My Life Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:57:36 GMT /section-555-stories-from-my-life#comments 0 https://dev.shakespearesmonkeys.com/comments/post.php/article/8021 https://dev.shakespearesmonkeys.com/comments/feed.php/article/8021 https://dev.shakespearesmonkeys.com/links/trackback.php?anchor=article%3A8021 https://dev.shakespearesmonkeys.com/article-8020-philadelphia-naval-hospital https://dev.shakespearesmonkeys.com/article-8020-philadelphia-naval-hospital Philadelphia Naval Hospital I want to take you on a journey. It is 1969 in the Philadelphia Naval Hospital. A hard winter holds us tight against our times, times that will eventually change somehow into indelible, picture-quality memories. It is late in that bleakest of months, February, and I have come in from the city. Another drunken midnight. We are shuffled away from view here on Ward R. Most are amputees, or soon to be amputees. I will escape the loss of my leg, although there are other forms of amputation. I am here on the ward, drunk, looking for a pint of scotch I have in the bottom of my footlocker. These are some long hours until morning. Black and White Scotch, those two little dogs on the label. This is my brand, far too much of it, like pouring the past and future through my mouth. Outside, the wind hammers at me. I drink absently, a drinking drunk, drank, and all the tenses of oblivion are here. The ward is filled to overflowing. I am emptying myself out, night by night. There is pain here on Ward R. It is physical and emotional. It is palpable, in the air all the time, stirred up in the active hours into the other emotions – anger, frustration, longing – but in this night place I can see that it is pain. It settles down on us like a blanket. I move slowly. One shouldn’t disturb things at night. It is out of the natural order. I co-operate with the universal laws. The ward is cold near the windows. They are painted shut, yet the cold gets in. It always manages to get in. Half a ward away, one of my fellow Marines is crying. Not a tears sort of crying, but a jerking-out-of-his-throat noise at odd intervals. I shook like that when I first came here, still existing around the world in those mountains. Who is this new arrival? Where was he when his arm began to turn up missing? I limp to his bed in my own inimitable way, painful prose in my leg, writing new chapters every hour. I will offer him a drink, some bottled ordering to straighten out these night twists. I am older than most of my abbreviated brothers. A couple of years on the calendar, but so much older than that during these Philadelphia nights. My ancient hands and all this ancient, amber liquid in me. “Where are I going, mister new arrival? Where are we all headed after this place? What is the meaning of your empty sleeve or the missing legs and fingers and feet and faces and dreams? You tell me, friend, and I will drink you a future right out of my imagination.” But I never say these words or any words. I sit on the edge of his bed, still reeling from an evening in Philadelphia, and tuck the blankets up around his neck. I hold the sides of his face, and his sobbing-out ceases. The wind is hammering this frail looking wing of the hospital, and I have quieted a small piece of all of us with my unpracticed hands. Can the warmth from all that whiskey really be pouring out of my fingers? This simple incident has shaken me, and I will need a drink when I go back to my bed, but I don’t get up. I sit here and he is quiet, and I drink right here, beside him…. For the rest of the winter, the long, snow-filled, pain-ridden winter - for the rest of the winter I awaken after midnight and ghost through Ward R, usually in one state of drunkenness or another, and fold people in as they sleep. Fold them in to keep them warm against all that is going on outside these colorless walls. Tucking blankets around stumps of legs and arms, around ruined faces, careful not to create any more pain. Every night this excursion. Seventy beds. A rotation of despair I have never forgotten. One night when I was a little unsteady, a gin night, I bumped along, noisier than I would have had myself be. Across the squad bay one of the new arrivals watched me. He spoke so quietly that, had it not been deathly still, I wouldn’t have heard him. -Hey, man, you cover people up every night? (I do not reply.) -Hey, would you help me sit up? You know, it’s hard. (He has lost one arm and one eye.) I help him sit up. While I hold him forward with one arm, I give him my pint of gin. He drinks and coughs almost noiselessly. -Where did you get hit? I ask. (My mind flashes back to the A Shau Valley.) I never hear his answer. Maybe he never answers. I hold him against me for a while and then lay him down so he can sleep. After I fold the blankets up to his chin, I hobble back to my bed. I will drift into sleep and dream deep, vivid dreams that will disturb me for days to come. ... more norm Stories From My Life Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:55:53 GMT /section-555-stories-from-my-life#comments 0 https://dev.shakespearesmonkeys.com/comments/post.php/article/8020 https://dev.shakespearesmonkeys.com/comments/feed.php/article/8020 https://dev.shakespearesmonkeys.com/links/trackback.php?anchor=article%3A8020