Through the Eyes of Another Era

06. September 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Memoir, Random Book and Media Musings

There is a splendidly ornate German castle which I toured once – a stone confection perched on a perfectly conical hill above the Mosel River in the little burg of Cochem am Mosel. That landmark little castle has all the towers, battlements, and archaic medieval Gothic ornamentation which one would wish for. However, it is all a 19th century confection, which anyone familiar with the mad romantic enthusiasm of that era for the high medieval can deduce at half a glance. The wealthy German industrialist who purchased the genuinely medieval ruins had it all rebuilt during the 1870s as a private residence for his family, with every romantic element of decoration that historical enthusiasts could imagine, (and they could imagine a lot) all jumbled together, more or less harmoniously. But it is all relentlessly the early 19th century’s vision of medieval splendor.

Mark Twain sourly blamed this mad enthusiasm for all things medieval and chivalric on the very popular novels of Sir Walter Scott – and he might have had a point. International fan fervor for the novels went as far as staging a lavishly-reenacted tournament and banquet at Eglinton Castle in Ayrshire, Scotland in 1839 (which was attended by thousands and nearly bankrupted the minor noble who had organized it) and the State of Maryland has jousting formally as the official state sport.
Which brings me to contemplate Scott’s best-known novel, the one which fired the 19th century romantic vision of the time of chivalry, inspired the Eglinton Tournament, and the passion for jousting in Maryland; Ivanhoe, which after numberless stage presentations following upon initial publication of the novel has also been made into at least three movies (more if counting derivative or foreign-language versions) and about as many television series dramatizations. The turns and twists of the plot are sufficiently incoherent to make me wish that someone like Anna Russell would deconstruct it for comic effect. The initial chapter reads as pointless, tedious and uninteresting … apparently grabbing reader interest from the drop was not in Sir Walter’s toolkit, even allowing for an inclination for a leisurely set-up in ye olden tymes. Neither did he have anything like Charles Dickens’ facility for evocative and fitting names for characters. A heroic swashbuckler named … Wilfred. Not exactly a name which rings with heroism… But the narrative grabbed an audience, heart and soul and set a certain aesthetic in concrete, as well as a model of chivalric behavior that was impressed on generations of gentlemanly Americans, Britons and Europeans. (A code of conduct shredded to ribbons on the battlefields of WWI, but which still limps on, here and there.)

Anyway, this came up as I watched the most recent TV serialization of Ivanhoe this week, recognizing none of the leading actors but Ciaran Hinds (as the Templar knight Bois-Guilbert), Christopher Lee chewing up the scenery as Saruman … no scratch that, the malevolent hunter of heretics de Beaumanoir – and a brief walk-on from Siân Phillips, as Elinor of Aquitaine, laying down the law to her kingly sons. It’s a rather good production otherwise – although the Saxon characters are generally excessively hairy (one can tell them from the Normans as the Normans are a little more tidily groomed. Also, the Saxons have round shields and the Normans have kite-shaped ones), and all the peasant characters are also excessively hairy, grubby and drably clad.

I was reminded again in watching the series of a certain observation, when it comes to creating a literary or a cinematic version of a past times; that as hard as one might try, the contemporary always sneaks in around the edges, although this may be more true of the visual arts like movies, television and paintings, just as it was in the recreated castle at Cochem am Mosel. It is screamingly obvious for instance, that Gone With the Wind was filmed in the 1930s, Désirée (with Jean Simmons and Marlon Brando) is from 1954, and that John Wayne’s Alamo, Dr. Zhivago, and the Elizabeth Taylor version of Cleopatra were all filmed in the 1960s. Curiously, this is even more marked over time; we will spot the contemporary-time-of creation sneaking in around the edges, the farther that we get from that time of creation the more clearly we can spot the historical anomalies – just as I could readily see the age of Victoria imprinting over that castle in Germany.

Tales of the Military – Host Nation Sensitivities

17. August 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Memoir

As it ought to be screamingly obvious, the various radio and television outlets run by the US military overseas for the diversion and amusement of the troops and their dependent families, operated with the permission of and at the pleasure of the host nations involved, some of which (Looking at you specifically, Greece under the PASOK administration of Andreas Papandreau) were very much touchier than others. Years from now, when I am in that final coma and circling the drain of this plane of existence, likely I will be galvanized into consciousness again by someone leaning down and whispering “Greece-Turkey-Cypress-NATO-European Economic Community!” into my ear.

Yes, any mention at all of any of those words in any element of broadcast media when I was stationed at Hellenikon, Greece in the mid-1980s meant flagging that reference and consulting with an immediate supervisor – or higher, all the way up to some operative at the US Embassy responsible for vetting references which might result in hurt feelings. Most usually it meant dropping whatever program contained such mention as being more trouble than it would be worth, especially at two in the morning. Nothing went on the air which hadn’t been vetted thoroughly, not even silly pop-culture celebrity interviews which had nothing to do with Greece. We all lived with the nightmare of someone in a show like that suddenly saying, “Oh, by the way, did you know that the Greek prime minister routinely commits sexual indecencies with barnyard animals?”

“Why that’s outright censorship!” observed the caller with an English accent one evening, asking why a popular extended-news program had been bagged for about the second time in a fortnight. (We had considerable of a shadow audience among the English-speaking population in the greater Athens area, a publicly available phone number – and heck, the night shifts were as boring as heck. I didn’t mind long talks in the wee hours with random callers, unless it was either of our two local nutcase regulars.)

“We prefer to consider it a tender concern for the fragile sensitivities of the citizens of our host nation,” I replied to the English caller.

Some local Greek nationals had very fragile sensitivities, indeed. One of our staffers had to have a produced radio spot pulled from rotation because it contained a passing mention of a cheap diner described as a ‘greasy spoon.’ Supposedly a member of the Greek Parliament got his shorts in a twist over it; apparently his grasp of American slang being less than minimal.

Mercifully, the local nationals in other places where I was stationed as an AFRTS staffer were not nearly so touchy. Indeed, Denmark – which essentially Greenland was a part of – had no host nation sensitivities at all, which was quite incredibly civilized of them. Japan was only sensitive about mention – or broadcast footage of the WWII atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Spain retained some heartburn about being beaten like a drum in the Spanish American War of 1898 – which topic appeared practically never in American radio and TV programs almost a hundred years later.

There was one regular radio program in our broadcast package which always mildly surprised us by never raising heartburn in various host nations over the years. That was Wolfman Jack, whose humorous bits sometimes trod heavily over the boundary of humor and well into raunch territory. I remember one such skit – with sound effects – called Beat the Press. (What you would think, with one correspondent confessing that he liked being beaten “on his tushie”, with whip-swishing sounds and yelps of pain.)

A station manager in my early days who had served in Thailand in the late 1960s told us of another Wolfman Jack moment heard when the show aired late at night – a joke which was so raw that he was astounded at not being ordered to pack up the entire broadcast station and leave the country within 24 hours. (The Thais were deeply embarrassed about being viewed as a kind of sexual Disneyland by American servicemen, back then.) The Wolfman rumbled in that deep growly voice that was his trademark: “What’s brown and lays in the forest? Smokey the Hooker!”  But the next morning – not a peep out of anyone, and we never heard any objection to the Beat the Press skit, or any others that were just as questionable. Our own explanation for this was that perhaps Wolfman Jack’s patter was so slangy, colloquial and idiomatically American that most of it went straight over the heads of most English-speaking foreigners. For which we were very grateful, in the long run.

The New 5-Year Plan

13. August 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Domestic, Memoir

Something lit a fire under my daughter when she became pregnant with Wee Jamie, the Wonder Grandson: in the space of a couple of mere hours and days she resolved to – a) get herself a real estate license, b) buy a house for herself and Jamie in a good school district by the time that he was old enough to start school, and c) organized insurance and prenatal care for herself. The prenatal care came first, of course – and then the real estate license, just in time to see the real estate market begin to wobble badly. She wound up working the rental market for clients of the brokerage who sponsors her now. She does have some regular sales clients and the commissions earned through them, as well as a VA disability pension. At this point the VA income allows her to spend time raising Wee Jamie, rather than depending on real estate dealings for everything. Yeah, various physical aspects of Marine Corps service did a number on her overall health …

Anyway, having met all three of those goals in the five-year time frame specified now leaves her at loose ends regarding ambitions. The mortgage on my own house is paid off – although I am still paying for work done to upgrade the siding, windows, HVAC and the water main. It will take another couple of years to get those expenses paid down … but in the meantime, my daughter has another five-year plan. This one is for both of us – to jointly purchase a little house in or near Rockport to spend long weekends and holidays in. We both like Rockport and the Texas Gulf Coast Shore very much. The surf is nothing to boast of, the water is pale greenish mostly (not deep blue or wine-dark) the coastal scenery is not famously scenic; nothing like Big Sur, the Amalfi coast, or the Hawaiian Islands … but we like the down-to-earth vibe of Rockport and Fulton, barely a two-hour drive away from where we both live now.

We like to see Jamie paddling in the shallow coast water, picking up little shells that have live crabs in residence, watching the boats head out into Aransas Bay from the Fulton marina, and sunrise and sunsets over the water. It would be nice to have a little place to go away to on holidays, and to invite friends to come and visit. My daughter wants to build up a collection of properties, just as an excellent friend of ours has done over the years.

So, to that end, I’m watching property listings in Rockport, Fulton and Copano – just to get a notion of what is there, and of our general tastes when it comes to a holiday retreat. Definitely three bedrooms, at least a bath and a half – on a raised foundation, if possible, and with at least one deep covered porch. Near to, but not necessarily on the water, not necessarily within town limits. There are a number of small homes in a price range which may be doable – but as my daughter advises – it will be the homeowner’s insurance which dictates affordability at least as much as the base price for the house. Visiting in person and having a rigorous inspection is a non-negotiable demand. We both have seen how pictures can … umm … conceal as much as they reveal of a structure.

In any case, it’s five years out from now, as this plan is also contingent on having both of our cars paid off entirely.

Short of the Horizon

09. July 2026 · Comments Off on Short of the Horizon · Categories: Domestic, Old West

After watching a BBC-produced version of Sense and Sensibility – I think they were hoping to have a Jane Austen series as popular as the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle version of Pride and Prejudice – what turned up in my “Hey, you wanna watch this?” queue was a Kevin Costner movie-series-whatever called Horizon. Looked at least somewhat interesting, being set in the trans-Mississippi old wild west, and he did a marvelous period move in The Highwaymen, and dare we hope for a movie-series-whatever which really went for a deep dive into that fascinating period in American history?

At any rate, I assumed that it must be better than that abysmally awful series Texas Rising, which was so bad that we bailed after watching the first episode, when a woman emerged from the crypt of the Alamo chapel after the fall of the presidio to the Mexican army under Lopez de Santa Anna. The crypt of the Alamo chapel … really? Texas history fans who watched every episode out of a masochistic sense of duty told me that it only got worse from there.

Anyway, I watched all of the first chapter of Horizon. Alas. just like Texas Rising, I am giving up on it after the first installment. Really, nothing at all happened in the last twenty minutes to pull all the various incoherent plot threads and random characters with unexplained motivations together. It was a series of brief, disjointed scenes set in widely-separated locations in the far west – a mining camp in Montana, an unsuccessful settlement called Horizon (whose residents are massacred in the first segment) and a US Army fort in what appears to be Apache country, alternating a wagon train of emigrants along the Santa Fe trail. All this taking place while the Civil War is in full swing, which makes the Apache country location for the settlement and the US Army fort and the Santa Fe emigrant train extremely problematic, as the Confederates and the Union armies were engaged in exchanging hot lead festivities for most of that period. There was also a railway being built through there with Chinese laborers … again, during the Civil War? Construction on the Central Pacific didn’t even begin until after the war. Emigrant wagon trains full of civilians going west along the Santa Fe trail, with a war on? In horse-drawn wagons, which seem to be treated as a kind of RV trailer, instead of being packed high to the covers with supplies, and the emigrants camping in tents at night? Well, OK then. At least I didn’t spot any zippers down the back of women’s costumes, and the ladies who have been seen in underthings are wearing shifts under their corsets. (This detail in 19th century costume is often omitted in historic movies and TV series) Dramatic and somewhat suspenseful scenes were played out at random with hardly any explanation or connection – it was all rather random and pointless, which is a pity. I’m afraid that this series-movie-whatever has fallen into the same old trap of seeing the Wild West as one big indistinct blur, with no regard for geographic specificalities, or for the way in which the trans Mississippi west radically changed over the last half of the 19th century; as I wrote some time ago, on another muddled movie:

“… to write something true, something authentic about the western experience – you have to do what the creators of The Trail to Hope Rose didn’t bother to do; and that was to be specific about time and place. The trans-Mississippi West changed drastically over the sixty or seventy years, from the time that Americans began settling in various small outposts or traveling across it in large numbers. And the West was not some generic all-purpose little place, where cattle ranches could be found next to gold mines, next to an Army fort, next to a vista of red sandstone, with a Mexican cantina just around the corner. No, there were very specific and distinct places, as different as they could be and still be on the same continent. 1880’s Tombstone is as different from Gold Rush-era Sacramento, which is different again from Abilene in the cattle-boom years, nothing like Salt Lake City when the Mormons first settled there – and which is different again from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s small-town De Smet in the Dakota Territory – or any other place that I could name, between the Pacific Ocean and the Mississippi-Missouri. Having writers and movie-makers blend them all together into one big muddy mid-19th century blur does no one any favors as far as telling new stories.” 

I Sold the Baby Crib

02. June 2026 · Comments Off on I Sold the Baby Crib · Categories: Domestic

The crib was quite a nice one – mostly wood and a classic design, painted light green. Neutral if one is not decorating aggressively in pink or blue, in expectation of a boy or girl. I went for cheery yellow in baby nursery décor and linens, in 1979 when I was expecting my daughter, when expectant parents generally had no notion at all until the moment of delivery. I was a very junior enlisted troop at that time, living in the barracks thousands of miles from family with no expectation of any support, emotional or otherwise from the man who I sadly had to consider an ex-whatever.

Anyway, the crib that I sold last week was surplus to needs, even though it was one of those ones which could be – with the purchase of additional bits and bobs available on Amazon – transformed into a youth bed, a small nursery love seat, or the headboard to a full-sized twin bed. Wee Jamie, the Wonder Grandson had long since outgrown it as a crib and my daughter had no need of it in her house in any of those permutations … so early in May I put it on Next Door, for sale at $50;  I hoped to get something back that I could spend on plants for the garden, as well as clear out more space in the house and latterly, the garage.

But it didn’t sell at that price point although there were two inquiries from parties I suspect were scammers – assumptions based on the wildly out-of-local area codes on their given phone numbers and then a song-and-a-dance over a proposed Zelle payment … I mean, really – you need to send me $500 because paying from a business account, according to a suspect email message supposedly from Zelle demanding a follow up on this urgent matter? An email with a non-functioning customer service number with an area code for Austin but a mailing address in Phoenix, Arizona? Look, Sunshine, I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night…

So, the crib didn’t sell and I acquiesced to marking it down to $30 and basically forgot about it until a query from a third party. Was it still available, and would I take $20? Yeah, but split the difference at $25. Reply from the prospective buyer: Sure. Running errands in the neighborhood Friday afternoon – would that time be OK for pickup?

Me (inclined by then to just take the thing to Goodwill but for the trouble of getting it there): Show up with money, this is the address, and the doorbell on the gate is shaped like an owl. I’d be home all afternoon. The item is in parts in my garage, so ready to go.

About all the effort I made for this was to be home Friday afternoon.  I was genuinely surprised when the gate doorbell rang inside the house shortly after noon, which sent the dog into spasms of barking – which I could hear from where I was renewing the paint on the back porch. Ah, the buyer for the crib. I was mildly surprised to have one actually appear. From the nym on Next Door I had kind of expected a male – but this was a very thin, very young woman in jeans and a polo shirt with the emblem of a local animal rescue organization on it.  She had a large dog in the back seat of her car; a small sedan approximately the size of my own. There was one of those dog-proof seat covers on the back seat; obviously her dog rode there often.

I opened the garage door, she opened up the trunk of her car, and we began playing automobile Tetris, loading in pieces of the crib. She asked me if I had change for a twenty, which I didn’t – but I did have Zelle, so that’s how payment went. The headboard was too large for the trunk, so she moved the dog to the front seat, and we slid the headboard into the space just behind the front seats. I had taken care to zip-tie a baggie with the various metal fasteners which hold the crib parts together to one of the side elements: I explained which machine bolts and nuts held the assembled crib together, and which were for fastening the mattress support. The buyer nodded and assured me that she would be sure to tell her friend who would be getting the crib as a present at her baby shower in a day or so – which fasteners went were.

That was the last piece of the crib. She sent me the $25 asked for it; done and dusted. She closed up her car, reassured the dog and drove away, leaving me to remember.

A present of a second-hand crib at a baby shower.

Been there, been the recipient of that sort of gift and darned welcome it was too back then. My best friend in the barracks in Japan, 1979 who organized a baby shower for me also bought a second-hand crib for the baby daughter who would eventually sleep in it. A highchair, too – as well as serving as coach for Lamaze classes and going into labor and delivery with me when the time came.

The thing that I was reminded about again, when I sold the crib – is that for a baby, second-hand doesn’t matter. A secure, safe place to sleep matters. Friendship and care matters from a friend to new parents. Love matters. Babies matter over all – and love, security and shelter are more important to them than practically any materiel second-hand and well-used bit of nursery furniture, cuddly soft blankets or cute onsies. That such things are supplied used and at second-hand … doesn’t matter at all.

 

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