Author Archives: Stacey

On the train: A road trip

Veterans who bonded through military service

The San Luis Obispo Amtrak Train Station at dawn. Photo by Stacey Warde

By Dell Franklin

I was at my starting point — the waiting room at the San Luis Obispo Amtrak Train Station at ten in the morning — sitting beside my lone bag and small thriftstore blanket rolled up and tied together, when I spotted two elderly gents walking into the station together, dragging two large suitcases apiece. Paunchy, graying, clad in blue jeans and heavy coats, unrecognizable in this part of the world, their ball caps and T-shirts told me they were proud Vietnam vets.

Later, we all boarded an Amtrak bus to take us to the train station in San Jose. A miserable ride. But once at the SJ station we were the only three left to take a train to Sacramento, where I was going to stay for two days and resume the rail to Denver and visit family.

We nodded to each other. I was in knee-high shorts, sneakers, a hooded sweatshirt, my usual beach garb. While they both seemed bald, I had a thatch of wild, two years growth of hair and a full reasonably trimmed beard.

We were brothers from the same generation, sons of fathers and uncles who served in WWII.

I asked the taller of the two if the train to Sacramento was going to be on time, and he said in a clipped mid-Western twang, “My guess is, it is. We were held up six hours going from Denver to LA when a rock slide covered the tracks.”“How was that?”

He winked. “Not the end of the world.”

As I stood beside him and his friend as the train rolled up, we had already established that I was going to Sacramento to play tennis and visit an old best friend I hadn’t seen in 16 years, and they were staying with family in Sac.

When I clambered onto the commuter train and sat down on one side, they saw me and automatically sat together on the opposite side facing me. The shorter man, gray, stocky, but somehow with a jaunty bounce, was from Mississippi. Tom. The bigger man was Mike. They had served together in ‘Nam in 1968 and ‘69.

“The worst of times,” I said. “Tet.”

They nodded. Mike did the talking. There was a twinkle in his eye, a wry slyness. He was from Kansas, 60 miles south of Kansas City, and owned a farm. He and Tom had met in ‘Nam and become such close friends that they met yearly and took train trips together, often visiting family throughout the country — a ritual. They had an easy camaraderie about them, unlike brothers or serious companions. Of course, they were curious whether a specimen like myself from their generation had served, and when I told them I’d been in the Army three years, everything opened up, because there was immediate trust. A bond. We were brothers from the same generation, sons of fathers and uncles who served in WWII.

Tom had just acquired his retirement home out in the country in Northern Mississippi after working his whole life in Memphis. He had a deep, slow Southern drawl. When I told him I once had a firecracker of a past girlfriend from Taylorsville, Mississippi, he pepped up, and suddenly I became Debbie Nelson of 1986: “Day-uhl, y’all such an asshole,” I drawled in my best imitation. “y’all jes’ keep pissin’ me off, no end.”

Tom laughed so hard he almost fell out of his seat. From then on it was like we were fellow soldiers at the Enlisted Men’s club, sitting at a table drinking Budweiser. There are no stories like Army stories. I told them I had joined late in 1963 and spent my tour in Europe, before the war started and the nationwide round-up of those who didn’t have the money or pull to get out of it began. 

Mike nodded. He shrugged. “You had to do what you had to do as well as you could and hoped to get out of it.”

“Seemed like it was part of the job, the duty of being an American citizen.” I said. “You expected to serve.”

They both nodded. Mike said, “That’s why I don’t like being thanked for my service.”

“Me neither.”

“But I’m proud of what I did.”

I said, “I think there’s a certain pride in doing the dirty job for your country, and the military is the dirtiest job there is.”

“It is,” Mike agreed. He gazed at me. “Sometimes, I think they ought to bring back the draft. So many of these kids seem too involved with themselves. They don’t have that feeling of giving back. Maybe they could get into the Peace Corps. Anything. Picking up trash along the highway.” He shrugged. “I don’t ever propose war, but the military did me some good. It gives you a different perspective on life. An appreciation.”

It was three hours to Sacramento and Mike and I talked and talked while Tom listened and gazed out the window at the East Bay. Mike raised emus for twenty years. The second tallest bird. A delicacy. Now he rented out his land to small farmers. The small farmer was disappearing into the jaws of the corporations. He was divorced and had six kids. He appeared farmer strong. There was a peacefulness about him, a reassurance that our country was still in a good place. 

We discussed what it was like having friends while in the military as compared to civilian life. As Tom dozed, I asked Mike if he felt the friends, or best friend you made in the military, was the best friend you’d ever make, and he nodded, strong conviction in his eyes, and said, “Absolutely. Tom and I are best friends. We are family.”

I then told him the best friend I ever had was also in the Army, John DeSimone, a gangster from Chicago. “We visited each other over the years,” I said. I was starting to get choked up. “When he died, guess who his wife called first, before his own brothers?”

“You.”

I nodded.

“He had your back.”

“All the way down the line. And I had his back.”

“That’s what it’s all about,” Mike said, that proud glint in his eye.

The trip went fast. When, after he  asked me what I did these days, I told Mike I was a writer and had a book –“Life On The Mississippi, 1969” – on Amazon, and explained what it was all about, he dialed it up on his phone, grinned, and said, after hitting a few keys, “I just ordered it.”

Dell Franklin served proudly in the U.S. Army, and writes from his home on the Central Coast of California.

Music in the Schools

I pleaded with my parents to please let me learn how to play the piano. My mother was aghast; she hated piano lessons as a little girl.

By Stacey Warde

Part I

My dad traded his used lawnmower for my first piano. I was in sixth grade.

We lived in the condos, Tustin Village, a tight mix of family units separated only by paper-thin walls through which, as children, we could listen to our neighbors’ pillow talk.

We had no need for a lawnmower.

All that grew in front of our condo, along the concrete slab for a walkway to our front door, was ugly green ivy, a great place for rodents to thrive. The few lawns that could be mowed were kept by the homeowners association in the finely manicured commons, “the putting greens,” we called them — located between two community swimming pools — where at night some of the Village kids would gather to smoke marijuana and pair up for sex for the first time.

Sometimes, we’d spend the day indoors, unsupervised, listening to early versions of Santana or Neil Young on a hi-fi stereo system that belonged to a friend’s parents.

In addition to hanging out in the putting greens and the swimming pools, we gravitated to the playground with its half-court basketball space, swings and tether ball court.

When we got bored with these activities, we’d gather in the greens to play, throw rocks and clods at the beehives hanging from a smattering of olive trees around the commons. Once, a beehive came crashing down on Lane as he rode his bicycle beneath the hive when a rock dislodged it from its place in the tree. He tore off on his bicycle toward home, screaming, covered with bees. His parents rushed him to the hospital. No one that I knew at the time had a love for playing a musical instrument.

The only public music on site occurred occasionally when someone in the Village hosted a cocktail party in the clubhouse, where kids weren’t allowed to loiter.

Prior to moving to the condos, we lived in a small rental house with a tiny lawn that needed frequent quick mowing. Since moving to the Village, however, the mower sat unused in a shed in the square concrete slab of our condo “backyard,” no larger than a prison cell with high fencing, a place that felt mostly like a developer’s afterthought, an accident or a trap, no place where kids or parents would want to spend their time, unless they were hiding, in deep depression, seeking outdoor isolation, or cooking on the barbecue.

The only person in the condos who played a musical instrument in that festering pool of latchkey children, mostly pre-teens, looking for things to do, was an older, stout, and not very popular girl whose father worked for an electronic typewriter business. He, of course, was proud to inform us that his daughter could play the accordion quite well and would love to give us a concert. Kids in the neighborhood turned down the offer several times until finally we gave in and sat for a session in which the stout girl played her accordion with verve and acumen, while her proud, beaming father accompanied her on his own accordion. I don’t exactly remember the music, only the pleasure her face showed while she played. We let her play for us only that one time.

Not long after the home mini-concert, a few of us decided to pick up guitars, it didn’t matter what kind, plastic, wood, whatever, we were gonna play. Forget the accordion! We burned ourselves out the first day and our band aspirations died just as suddenly.

As a sixth-grader, I was discovering that girls had superpowers as we hung out on bored afternoons, listening to records, watching TV, feeling the itch of pubic hairs starting to grow, and sometimes curious hands rummaging through our pants. I needed and wanted more focus, something creative, something to fill in the hours when I wasn’t at the ballpark, or throwing oranges at cars from inside the surrounding orange groves, or lounging on a Saturday afternoon at a friend’s house while his sister tried to wrestle me off the couch.

Dad traded his mower for a beautiful clunky old upright piano that barely fit into our tiny three-bedroom condo. It took up nearly half the dining area downstairs but it fit snugly where it stood against the paper-thin wall. He traded it with my beloved great-aunt Doris, an avid gardener with a big beautiful home garden in Laguna Beach where she and her sister, my grandmother, grew up. She needed the lawnmower more than we did, and she would put it to good use. I loved visiting her home and her garden, which always felt like welcome spaces to me, mostly on account of her warmth and easy Southern California demeanor and the lovely roses in her garden.

I pleaded with my parents to please let me learn how to play the piano. My mother was aghast; she hated piano lessons as a little girl.

Mrs. Boger, a classical pianist, had come to our school, the brand new Heideman Elementary School. She came to play music as part of a trio, and I was mesmerized. We sang songs in school with one of the teachers who enjoyed singing but we had never seen a live performance by real pros. I felt drawn to the mix of sound from stringed instruments harmonizing with Mrs. Boger’s piano playing.

The mini-concert was my first real awakening to live music. I don’t know whose idea it was to bring music into the school but I’m glad that it happened; it’s been a lifelong journey and enjoyment in the more than 50 years since. Music, as I understood it until Mrs. Boger came along, had mostly been sing-alongs at school or took place in the background, usually while listening to my Uncle Ron’s vinyl selection of soul, which I still love. But music wasn’t something I’d ever experienced up close, not in a personal or intimate way, not where you could actually see and hear the musicians playing, working together to create harmony.

My great-grandmother, Marie Harding Thurston, apparently could be quite dramatic; she loved the theater and she loved to sing. From “Laguna Beach of Early Days,” by J.S. Thurston, published by History Press.

No one in my family, as far as I knew, had ever played a musical instrument. Only much later did I learn that my grandma played the piano when she sat down one evening and started playing from some old sheet music we had in the house. Her mother, a pioneer educator, Marie Harding Thurston, apparently could be quite dramatic; she loved the theater and she loved to sing, sometimes embarrassing mom and her siblings in a Laguna Beach church because she sang louder than everyone else.

None of that came down to me until dad traded his lawnmower.

I marveled at this music in the flesh, Mrs. Boger and her trio, sound produced by perfectly imperfect humans keeping time and blending themselves in a mix of harmony that I found more compelling than lumbering through a bunch of reading cards, or trying to avoid falling asleep at my desk during “self-directed” exercises such as reading and math. I hated penmanship too, especially when the teacher would try in vain to force my left-handed writing style to look more like a right-hander’s by twisting my hand back instead of letting it curl awkwardly around my pen as felt natural to me.

I couldn’t take my eyes off Mrs. Boger’s hands, though, left and right, as they moved effortlessly across the keyboard, producing the most amazing, articulate sound, in a language or vocabulary that felt both familiar and foreign, in time and in sync with these other musicians. When the performance was over I ran up to the piano. How long does it take to learn how to play like that? What was she reading? Sheet music? What’s that? I couldn’t make sense of any of it. She asked me if I would like to learn how to play the piano.

Yes! I told her. She reached into her purse and gave me her business card. “Give this to your parents,” she said. “Tell them you want to take piano lessons.”

Stacey Warde writes and practices the piano daily from his home in Mendocino County. This article first appeared on Medium.

On being a Jew

In an increasingly anti-Semitic world

Dell Franklin may not be the ideal Jew but he aligns himself with those who have once again become targets of escalating anti-Semitism in the US and abroad. Illustration from his Rogue Voice classic, “The shortest bar mitzvah in the history of the Jewish religion.”

by Dell Franklin

On being a Jew, I’d say I’ve been pretty lax these past 60 or so years, as I haven’t been in a synagogue in all that time, except to deliver eulogies at my parents’ funerals. I get lost when discussing religion and was raised never to bring it up in any conversation in fear of insulting somebody. When somebody tries to proselytize me to any religion, I quickly inform them I’m hopeless and at best an agnostic, or nonbeliever.

Still, I was raised by Jewish parents who both grew up in the Midwest amid virulent and, in my dad’s case, vicious anti-Semitism. And, as a kid, I went to synagogue, usually by force, resentful because it was unbearably boring and took me away from baseball, football and whatever else was on the agenda in blue-collar, roughneck Compton, California, where I grew up.

Jewish boxing champ Barney Ross emerged as one of boxing’s great fighters in Chicago in the 1930s.

My father grew up in Chicago in the 1920s and ‘30s, the only Jew in an anti-Semitic German/Polish neighborhood. From childhood on, he and his sisters were called kikes, sheenies, Jew boys and Jew bitches, and yes, were spat upon. Dad engaged in fights nearly every day. He was built for it, and by 13 trained in a boxing gym that produced the great Jewish champion Barney Ross. By 16, dad was an amateur champion under an Irish name because he didn’t want his parents knowing what he was doing.

You see, as in most Jewish families, plans were made for dad to become a lawyer, doctor, dentist, or businessman. What they didn’t expect was a psychotic athletic competitor who received a football scholarship to the University of Illinois, and ended up playing for the Detroit Tigers in baseball’s major leagues.

At the beginning of his 17-year professional baseball career, dad dealt with anti-Semitism quietly, until it went too far, and then he pulverized a Nazi teammate who belonged to an American Bund, and who repeatedly needled dad with the usual anti-Semitic insults. Dad carved out his eye with his fists and the man never played ball again. He vowed no Jew hater would ever forget the beatings he administered them. 

Young Dell Franklin with his father.
Young Dell Franklin with his father, who pummeled a Nazi sympathizer teammate.

Dad despised the foolish stereotype that Jews were elitist intellectuals and money mongers who wouldn’t fight. “Your old man’s a fighting Jew,” he’d tell me, flashing his most murderous, soul shaking glare, then wink, and grin.

Growing up with a father like this, and an extremely educated bookworm mother, a nurse and an Eleanor Roosevelt bleeding-heart liberal who applied a scholar’s dedication to Jewish history, I was bombarded with the history of the Jews, and especially the Holocaust. I was reminded constantly of a culture that produced people like Einstein and Oppenheimer as well as media and entertainment giants and business titans. This was already part of my identity and forced me to expect much of myself, or at least more than what most people supposedly expected of themselves, because I was a Jew. 

In my mother’s and dad’s families, their sisters and brothers insisted on marrying fellow Jews. Thus, I was attracted to lush Irish girls and voluptuous Italians. I was a full-on jock, and not one Jew lived in our neighborhood. I was an unmotivated student who had no interest in medicine, the law, or business.

I was not called a kike or sheeny or Jew Boy, but, rather affectionately, “Herman.”

At that time, being so young and obsessed with myself and sports, I failed to realize that when something tragic or disastrous faced the Jews, it became resoundingly obvious to me we were not necessarily a religion, or a race, or a nationality, but an historically tortured tribe, which was why, possibly, three months after my Army discharge, I was at the Israel Embassy in Los Angeles trying to volunteer as a soldier for what turned out to be the Six-Day War in the Middle East in 1967.

Of course they informed me I had to become an Israeli citizen and calmed me down by explaining they felt the war would be over soon in their favor, which it was.

But my inclination to end up at the embassy ready to fight for a religion I had not observed since I’d left home reminds me of how I feel today, when the ugly cruelty and ignorance of anti-Semitism in the world, and in the United States especially, is again rearing its ugly and evil head.

After 55 years of utter stagnation, I am riled. Not about being suddenly fervent about my Jewishness, but of being a member of a people I respect and admire and yes, love, despite myself. Once a Jew, always a Jew. Like my father, I can’t read from the Torah during high holiday services, but when I observe those gentle Jewish people who were shot down in that Pittsburgh synagogue a couple years ago by an anti-Semitic monster, I am a Jew.

And watching and listening to these survivors of that slaughter, and how forgiving and spiritual they are, brought back the civility and kindness, the warmth of the Jewish people I grew up with, and how if you are in trouble they rally around you and form a womb of comfort and safety that only a people who have been through what they have can.

I recall, as a cab driver back in the late 1980s in San Luis Obispo, Calif., picking up at the airport a bearded man nearing around 75 who had a regal bearing and penetrating gaze. He was visiting a daughter. He sat in the front seat and talked to me in an accent, and when I asked him where he was from because I was a writer and very curious, he said, Israel.

His name was David Kopenhaus and he was originally German but had fought with the British in WWII, and then against the British in 1948 as a member of the Irgun terrorist organization in Israel, and again in the 1967 and 1973 wars against the Arabs. He also explained he was not necessarily religious, and seldom went to temple. “I am more of a Nationalistic Jew,” he said, looking directly at me with intermittently piercing and kindly eyes.

But I knew what he meant. He had seen it all. And I guess he saw into me, too, because, when I dropped him off, he said, “I enjoyed talking to you — landsman.”

“How did you know I was Jewish?” I asked, because I hadn’t mentioned it.

“As an Israeli, we make it our business to know these things.”

Then he winked, and we shook hands.

Remembering a person like this, and my mother and father, and what is currently going on in this country with the rise of anti-Semitism, I admit to being a proud Jew, ready to rally and rumble, if necessary. △


Dell Franklin is the founding publisher of The Rogue Voice and author of “Life on the Mississippi 1969,” available at Amazon.

Attack on the Capitol:

Parade of patriots, or fools?

I’ve learned that wisdom, the rightful use of knowledge, brings life, more to be treasured than gold. Photo by Stacey Warde

Let a man meet a bear robbed of her cubs, rather than a fool in his folly. — Proverbs 17:12

by Stacey Warde

The classic definition of a fool is someone who believes in a lie, who lives their life according to fables and unfounded claims, who refuses to acknowledge truth, all of which eventually result in their own or someone else’s ruin.

Fools are not to be trifled with; they are supremely dangerous — better to come across a bear robbed of her cubs than to meet a fool in his folly, says the author of Proverbs. They pose a real threat to the health and well-being of the community with their loud, false, and vociferous claims.

They bear false witness and malign others to further their own ends, and refuse to bend their hearts or minds to truth despite all the evidence, and willfully submit themselves (and those within their circle of influence) to eventual disgrace and humiliation. A wise person seeks to heal and mend, to build and create rather than malign and destroy.

There’s no peace or rest with fools; only calamity. They set their sights on the destruction of all that is good. Their goal is to demolish and tear down. They haven’t any plan or clue on how to make things better, only on how to destroy, disrupt, and divide. Their words — often rhetoric that has no basis in reality — are full of poison and misrepresentations of the facts, which don’t matter to them at all.

I’ve been no less a fool myself on many occasion, believing lies, getting angry at imagined slights, lashing out unintelligently, living in the fantastical world of magical thinking, holding fast to half-truths and trinkets of reality, concocting stories out of whole cloth, indulging in speculation, rumor, and hearsay, supporting lost causes. Over the years, however, and in spite of my own follies, I’ve gained more respect for wisdom and understanding because these, at least, are much less likely to end in disaster — for individuals as well as the larger community.

I’ve learned to think critically, parse truth from fiction, because I believe that these are the mature and responsible ways to behave as a citizen, because, let’s be honest, as even the Bible says, wisdom is more to be desired than folly. What is the nature of wisdom?

I’ve learned that wisdom, the rightful use of knowledge, brings life, more to be treasured than gold; wisdom and the actions derived from it are in accord with nature and are more likely to result in the good that promotes healthy community and constructive dialogue. Folly, living and believing in a lie, leads to shame, villainy, and death, as we’ve already witnessed and continue to witness among those who claim falsehoods as their guiding light.

So, here we are, a nation apparently half full of fools, on the heels of a global pandemic, still believing a lie, still clinging to villainy and the threat of armed resistance, still stupidly thinking against all the evidence and sound reason that Democrats stole Election 2020, still spuriously claiming that covid-19 is “just a flu,” despite the million victims in the US who have died from the disease, still holding up a false god (any politician, not just Trump) as their Savior, ad nauseam…. How sad, how really truly sad, that folly, maliciousness, and shameful, willful ignorance have become the hallmark of a “patriot” in the U.S. These so-called patriots now call good evil and evil good, promoting acts of violence such as we saw during 2020’s January 6 attack on the nation’s Capitol with blessings from the Biggest Fool of all.

I’ve had conversations with well-meaning friends and individuals who believe that we ought not to judge or criticize the wayward fool, that we ought ourselves to remain neutral in the false hope that we might turn their hearts towards what is true and lovely. Rather, these friends have argued, we ought to remain open to conversation or intelligent dialogue with people who have succumbed to the lies and ignorance of, say, shadowy figures or movements like the Pillow Guy or QAnon. I say that’s bunk. Holding out hope for a fool is wasting your time. Better to tie an 800-pound rock around your neck and jump into a lake. Leave the presence of a fool and let them wallow in the sewage of their own delusions. You’re better off without them. Save your gifts and talents for those who will listen.

And, at the risk of ignoring my own admonition to move on from the presence of fools and being maligned by false witnesses and sundry other misinformed individuals, if you are one of those people parading their folly in the streets, carrying “stop the steal” signs, claiming in ignorance and against all evidence or reason that Trump won the election, thumbing your nose at covid-19, defying science and public health guidelines, all I can say is, Just stop! Don’t be a fool. Don’t go down in history as someone who based their life on a lie. Stop trying to subvert our democracy. Stop minimizing the pain and suffering of those who have died from covid-19. Call yourself tragically misinformed, or claim the moniker of fool, but don’t flatter yourself by calling yourself a “patriot.” There’s no virtue or wisdom in such a specious claim. You, who ignorantly believe and willfully spread these lies, are no patriot.

A patriot doesn’t resort to arms in defiance of just laws, or try to destroy what is good; a patriot fights for liberty from real, not imagined, oppression. A patriot isn’t blind or foolish, or a subscriber to QAnon, or a follower of imbecilic claims by people like Mike Lindell (and the list goes on…) who says he has evidence of liberal malfeasance but has only offered evidence of his own delusions. A patriot defends the right to vote, demands that all votes be counted (once, twice, three times, it doesn’t matter), not the right to add or subtract votes at whim.

Let wisdom and reason, not folly, be your guiding light. Our republic, and the blood of those who sacrificed their lives to preserve it, demands nothing less. ∆

Stacey Warde writes from his home in Mendocino County where he studies and trusts in the words of the wise. This essay originally appeared on Medium.

I got slapped hard in the face too

For a much worse offense than telling a lame joke

I’m still learning how to swim years after the terror of drowning, after getting thrown into the deep end without knowing how to swim.

by Stacey Warde

Toxic masculinity (circa 1975)

At 15, I took a round slap to the face from a young woman about my age. Not for making a lame joke but for something much worse, for an assault.

I was in the midst of drying off after taking a short ocean swim break from my duties as a store clerk at Clark’s Surf Shop on 15th Street in Newport Beach, Calif., then a popular summer hangout for teens. We rented rafts and umbrellas, and sold mens and womens swimwear, towels and lotions, whatever anyone needed to stay comfortable on the beach.

My work mate, an accomplished popular surfer named Jack, who was a few years older than I, laughed uproariously as the smack of the woman’s hand against my face reverberated throughout the shop.

“What did you do?” he asked, still laughing as the girl strode proudly back out onto the crowded, sun-drenched boardwalk that ran up and down the Newport Beach Peninsula, busy with cyclists on beach cruisers, skaters on skateboards and roller skates, and sunbathers strolling, looking for a hookup or a hamburger.

“I smacked her on the butt,” I said. He laughed even more loudly.

“You did what? Do you even know her?”

No, I told Jack, who was teaching me how to bodysurf the monster south swells that pummeled Orange County’s south-facing beaches during the late summer, swells kicked up by Baja’s hurricane season. I respected him and felt the rightness of the humiliation I suffered in that moment as he sought to understand what had just happened.

I thought I was hot stuff, running out to the ocean’s edge with my swim fins, fearless in the face of some really big waves that Jack taught me how to bodysurf, eager to show off what I’d learned from him. He was the real water ballet dancer, spinning down the face of some of the biggest waves I’d ever seen, holding himself steady halfway down and hydroplaning on his hands inside the wave, the wave’s lip threatening to bury him beneath a ton of water, then spinning himself several times more before torpedoing himself out the back side to meet the next big wave. He was fearless and artful and at-ease in the water, and I really admired those qualities. 

***

It had taken me a long time to get comfortable with swimming because, as a young boy, I was terrified of the water after someone, a male in the family, decided to teach me how to swim by throwing me into the deep end for a “sink or swim” swimming lesson, which I failed. I struggled and began sinking until someone fished me out. I refused from that point on never to go near the water.

Until then, as a 5-year-old, I had been perfectly content to hang out in the shallow end of the pool, clinging for dear life to the pool’s edge. But for some reason, not from malice so much as from the notion that a boy shouldn’t be a pansy hanging onto the edge of the pool, never venturing beyond his  limits, one of the menfolk in my family decided to test my mettle by lifting me out of the shallow water and hurling me into the deep end. I remember it being one of my uncles; mom says it was my biological father who had abandoned us one year earlier. In either case, someone had decided it was time for me to stop being a “pussy.”

Mom had to hire someone, a young woman, to lure me back into the pool after nearly one year of my refusal to get wet, she says. It wasn’t easy; it took some work, patience on the part of my instructor. I don’t remember exactly when I began to really love the water but eventually I overcame my fear of swimming and became a proficient swimmer–and learned to be wary around the menfolk in my family.

***

I trusted Jack, and the girls on the beach seemed to like him as well. He was not a macho kind of guy, even with his hairy chest. He had a slight build, high-pitched voice, and was not “manly” in the typical sense but more like the dolphins we’d see swimming in the warmer south-swell waters, gleaming, playful, and proficient. He was graceful, good-natured, and good-humored.

Whenever possible, friends and I would watch him swim each time he ventured out into the ocean and we would marvel over his mastery of these enormous waves and over his ease of movement in the rush of water pounding the beaches. He usually was the only swimmer to brave those waves, and the lifeguards knew him well enough to leave him alone while they chased everyone else safely away from the water’s edge.

I explained to him how I’d noticed this girl on the beach; she was a regular, and I found her attractive. As I was running up the boardwalk, out to the water for my midmorning swim, I saw her coming toward me, and so took the liberty of slapping her bikini butt as I trotted past her.

“What?” Jack gasped.

She’d waited, apparently, watching me as I took my swim, and followed me back into the shop to correct the situation. She walked to where I was drying off in the store, stood herself directly in front of me, took a deep breath, looked me square in the eye, and with a heave of her arm, slapped me hard. Really hard on the face, not just with fingers but palm and the heavy swing of her outstretched arm. It hurt and it stung. Then, to the music of Jack’s laughter, she marched out.

“You better go find her and apologize,” he said.

I  gave him a look, as if to ask if he could manage the shop without me because it was getting close to lunch time, the busiest part of our day, and also because I didn’t really want to apologize. I was afraid to apologize, to admit that I’d done something wrong. Yet I knew that I’d made a poor choice, and hurt someone, and Jack knew it too. I could feel the pain, not just on my reddened, hard-slapped face, but more deeply. Jack shooed me away. Go! Take care of business, he seemed to be saying. I put on my shirt and took off for the beach.

I was half-hoping that I wouldn’t find her. Yet, one way or another, I would need to make things right, admit that I was wrong for slapping that girl’s butt, that I had taken liberty where none was offered. I would, as was so common during summers at the beach, inevitably run into her again. What would I say? How would I face her? I could feel the shame building up inside of me.

Plus, if Mrs. Clark, the nicest lady in the whole world and owner of the shop, caught wind of what had happened, I’d feel more awful than I already did. If word got out that one of her boys working the surf shop was assaulting potential customers, she would have been hurt too. She trusted us enough to leave the shop in our hands and let us run the place. Knowing also our love for the ocean, she was ok with us taking turns on big south swell days to test ourselves in the water. I knew I had a good thing, this summer job on the beach.

I found the girl, sitting among friends on towels in the sand, lounging, enjoying the sun and breeze, not far from the public restrooms where so many of the usual crowd would hang out at “The Wall,” a brick and mortar construction, to watch the surf and gaze at beachcombers as they trudged through the sand to find their places. It was a glorious summer day, the waves roaring up the wet sand, electricity in the air as the south swells pounded the beach.

I braced myself, wary of alarming her and her friends, eager to make things right, to make peace. One of her friends turned to see me coming and warned the others. They all turned to look as I approached, making sure, I guessed, that I would not commit another assault.

“I came to apologize,” I said nervously, hoping to set their minds at ease, dropping to my knees in the sand to avoid towering over them where they sat on their towels. “I’m really sorry,” I said to the girl. 

“You had no right to do that!” she said. “You don’t even know me!”

“Yes, I know. I’m really sorry. I won’t ever do it again.”

Her demeanor softened and we chatted briefly about how much we enjoyed the ocean and how that was the most important thing, our only real common interest. Beyond that, we would not be friends, merely acquaintances. Periodically, we would see each other and wave, or say hello. 

My struggles with women did not end there.

I’ve offered apologies for worse behavior than slapping a girl on the butt. As a man, I’ve succumbed to the same toxic maleness that possessed whoever threw me into the pool to teach me a lesson about swimming when I didn’t know how to swim. And once, when I called someone “a pussy,” a woman, a friend and lover, laughed at me and said: “Pussy? Try pushing a baby through your penis and see what happens!”

***

The men in my family, mostly uncles, wanted what was best for me, and they taught me what they thought I needed to know to thrive in the world as it was then (and perhaps still is) configured: Men had to be tough, not whiners or “little pussies,” but ready to fight for what was right, and grab what’s theirs before someone took it away. There was no time to cry, or “be like a girl.”

I ventured out into the deep end, however, not because I “manned up” when thrown into it, but because a woman was kind and patient enough to coax me back, not to go deep right away, but simply to get into the water again–after experiencing the terror of drowning–and actually becoming unafraid of and passionate about swimming.

I’m still learning how to swim. The deep end is indeed a scary place. 

Stacey Warde is a writer living in Mendocino County, not far from the ocean.

Angry, I burned two bibles

There was no truth or love to be found in them

by Stacey Warde

I burned a book once. Actually, I burned two books with the same title at the same time: The New World Translation of the Bible.

Yes, I burned, not just one, but two “bibles.”

I’m not proud; it’s just something I felt had to be done and, at 15, imagined that I had a good reason for doing it, and so I found an excuse to put a match to the pages of a book, and not just any book but a religious one: Anger being the primary motive.

“Fuck this book,” I said to myself after my absentee biological father, who showed little interest in me or my brother, tried to shower us with his “love” by sending us each our own copies of the preferred religious tract of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

I knew from base instinct that I would never read it, knew that I was angry about receiving the book as a gift, and felt in my gut the cheapness of the gesture, of thrusting religion in my face without any sign of the love that religion presumably demands.

Despite my anger–coupled with the ongoing childhood fear of abandonment, the guilt and shame of neglect from a parental figure who ghosted his family more than a decade prior–I knew these books were bullshit. There was no love or truth to be found in them, at least not as demonstrated by the one, a devotee, who sent them, my absentee father.

Lucky for me, my mother remarried, and I found a real father, who wasn’t religious at all, who left the Catholic Church when it informed him that he couldn’t marry a divorced woman whom he loved until the day he died nearly 45 years later. The man who actually spawned me had mostly disappeared, with the exception of two brief encounters before his final attempt to win me over with Jehovah.

Once, as a boy of 6, I was playing with my cousins at the ocean’s edge at our favorite spot in Laguna Beach when my aunt, then in her mid-20s, came running down to the water, where we played in the wet sand. “Stacey!” she said breathlessly, pointing toward Main Beach, “Is that your father, walking this way?”

I looked, as any child would, with great eagerness to spy out the only man I could then imagine as my father, the one who left me two years earlier when I was 4. He wore a Speedo swimsuit, the kind of swimwear muscle men wore to the gym, and had a certain look about him.

I started running and stopped him to ask, “Are you still my father?”

He seemed startled, grasping for words, “Well, legally…” I heard him say, and felt my heart drop. I hated him at that moment. I knew his words were slippery, not to be trusted, escape mechanisms, attempts to shuffle the truth, create illusion and distance, and had no real substance to them. I knew then he would never ever, nor would he want to, be my father.

He tried once more to contact us when I was 10. I had already given my heart and loyalty to mom’s second husband, my stepfather who, by all accounts, was the only real father I ever had. Nonetheless, “Jim,” as mom used to call her ex, said he was interested in visitation rights with me and my brother.

He arranged to meet with mom and Mr. Radice (as most of my friends called my new stepdad) and work out the details. My brother and I were told to wait upstairs. When all was said and done, we were asked to come downstairs and say hi to Jim. We said hi, and that was the last we ever saw or heard from him–until he sent us those ugly puke green bibles.

I told my brother, “Watch this! I’ll show you what to do with these.” I took the bibles out to the curb in front of our home and placed them in the gutter. I poured gasoline over the green hardcovers with the gold lettering and the flimsy thin white pages of the two bibles. Then, I struck a match and tossed it onto the gasoline-doused bibles.

They burst into flame and crackled. I glowered in my contempt for my father’s hypocrisy, for his false and limited idea about what love was.

I felt a certain delight and shame, each emotion cohering with my anger and hurt until I wished the fire would burn itself out already, leaving nothing but the charred remains of the hideous, green books with gold lettering. I felt like I was doing my brother and myself a favor by finally cutting ties with a man who would always be a ghost to us, never real, never within reach, not a human face we would recognize.

I didn’t think for a moment that I was doing anything wrong, felt that my anger toward the man who fathered me without taking any of the responsibility of a father was fully justified; and what better way to show it than to put to flame this lame attempt of his to reach out to me and my brother after more than 10 years of virtual silence?

I wasn’t concerned about the books so much as I was about the statement I wanted to make: “Fuck you, ‘dad!’ Fuck you and your religious bullshit!”

By the time we’d received these “gifts,” he’d already fathered a half-dozen more children with nary a word about where he was or what he was doing. As a boy, whenever I’d ask mom why he didn’t seem interested in us, she’d say, “You’re better off without him.”

I never understood that, never believed it entirely despite his absence and disinterest, until many years later when I learned from a couple of half-siblings that living with a Jehovah’s Witness as a father was a living hell.

They left home as soon as they came of age, if not sooner; one of them committed suicide.

As the flames turned the white pages of the books into char, my late grandmother, Virginia, who lived to be 100, pulled up to the curb. I saw a look of horror cross her face as she raised her head to peer over the steering wheel and through the windshield of her car to take in the scene. She pushed her door open and bounced out of the car.

“WHAT are you doing?” she demanded.

“Oh, it’s nothing. Don’t worry, grandma,” I said, “we’re just burning these fake bibles that Jim sent us.”

I didn’t think much of her disapproval, didn’t imagine that her horror had more to do with the idea of burning books than it did with me making a statement, or even simply starting a fire in the gutter in front of the house. She loved books and could often be found in her room, reading. Books were her treasures.

She came from a family of educators. Her mother, Marie Harding Thurston, pioneered the first schoolhouse in Laguna Beach. We were encouraged to read and educate and better ourselves. We visited the library often and became familiar with the ways of accessing information, sorting truth from fiction, learning to love both truth and fiction, and knowing the difference between the two.

The library eventually became one of my favorite places to hang out as I got older. There, I met fierce advocates of the right to access all kinds of data, if one was interested in really educating himself. There, in the library, I found people who really cared, who encouraged me to learn more, who seemed to suggest an endless flow of data was available if I wanted to have it. The sky’s the limit for anyone who wants to learn something, these librarians seemed to be saying.

I also found through many solo hours in the library that it wasn’t so bad to be alone. I’m grateful for my many hours of study and research in the library, finding treasures galore in books on the library shelves and elsewhere in the system.

I’ve never looked but I imagine you could find in the library a copy of the green-bound bible that Jehovah’s Witnesses have loved and cherished over the years.

Now, nearly 50 years after I set those bibles aflame, I still would not choose to read them, nor do I have any interest in doing so, but I would not burn them either.

Stacey Warde is a writer living in Mendocino County.

PERSON OF INTEREST in Gualala Raid

Superbowl streaker wearing pink leotard

by Stacey Warde

As often happens in small communities, especially where news is hard to come by, stories get blown out of proportion yet, on a dime, they can also twist themselves into even stranger truths, or fictions. This one, however, looks to be true.

In my lighthouse post, I reported that a small army of armed men wearing black hoodies had descended upon a home not far from Gualala, the southern tip of Mendocino County where pot grows more quickly, and perhaps draws, or used to anyway, more dollars to the area than the surrounding redwoods.

The number of attackers, as reported by the local media, is still unclear but, reading between the lines, I would guess it was probably in the neighborhood of two banditos, not 20 as originally reported, one of whom was allegedly identified and is now a person of interest in the raid: Yuri Andrade, also known as the man who streaked through a Superbowl game wearing a pink leotard.

The only person who seems to be active on the story is a fella who goes by the name of Matt LaFever, an educator not a full time journalist. I like that he’s out there, since no one else seems to be actively monitoring the police but him. Still, we had to wait TWO days for an update on 20 armed thugs running around in the woods.

LaFever found some good material, documenting the police getting a warrant to search the besieged home. Of course, the cops found nearly 2,000 pounds of pot there. Perhaps there was also a ton of cash, as there usually is because banks refuse huge deposits of cash earned off a Schedule 1 drug, but we don’t know because the details are not yet forthcoming, either because no one is telling us, or because no one is asking.

Obviously, this is an unfolding drama and, in the interests of promoting the work of a local journalist doing the best he can, I highly recommend reviewing LaFever’s report, which includes photos and video, on the Person of Interest: The Superbowl streaker who wore a pink leotard.