June 28, 2013 9:39 pm.
There are 3 food groups: the malbec group, the meatball group, the coffee group. I will have to put the ramen noodles and red pepper sauce and pickled cucumbers into the meatball group. All the really nutritious plants and other creatures will find themselves in the meatball category.
In a hundred years I imagine most will eschew the killing of animals and disapprove of my carnivorous ways. For one thing in 2113 food distribution will be greatly improved; seeds planted, the crops harvested, the staple products will be machined, packaged, shipped, distributed, prepared and consumed all in one efficient process. In another 100 years in 2213 the efficiency will extend through the alimentary canal to fecal waste and the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. I get ahead of myself.
In 2113 people will see that feeding crops to animals to kill and eat is inefficient and contrary to the (future) prevailing ethos. The world will not be able to afford to waste food production capability as they do now and will not generate evil karma in that way. Yes, karma will be measurable by then.
I feel like such an old curmudgeon because I eat meatballs. I love them, along with the gravy, the malbec and the good cup of joe. It has to do with my being born in 1949 to people who came of childbearing age in the years following the end of World War II and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. Actually one was one kind of bomb, the other was another. Possibly fission and fusion. Perhaps atomic and hydrogen. Both bombs were more than horrible and caused untold misery for generations to suffer.
My grandson Cyrus Struckman just invited me to the bedroom to nap with my wife Penny and him. Cyrus is 6 years old and able to sound out words. He saw what I had just written here and he said, “Oh my gosh!”
Someday he will read these words.
Bill Moomey was a religious man, but I doubt if he really thought he would be dead now.
I don’t think I ever told how I prowled around the university department of geology in the late 1950s. In those days it was in a creaky old building with the inscription “science hall” on the front. The steps were worn, the floor was warped and covered with many layers of varnish. It was just to the right of Main Hall. The law school was just to the left as you faced east on the oval in Missoula.
The building was probably the site of many science lectures, including ones my uncle Bud attended. However, when I prowled I went down the hall short of the lecture hall at the back and into the lab on the right. Many lab benches made aisles in the room which took perhaps a quarter of the the area of the first floor. The periphery had drawers and cabinets with rock specimens. Trilobites. Galena, mica, this -ite and that. The 30 gal. trash can had lots of rock specimens. I took the “trash can” aspect to mean that I could freely take from it. Home. Then to school for show and tell.
At one point I took orders from my 5th grade classmates “Do you want some rocks?” Yes, one said. Bring me 2 rocks. I wrote on a paper. “Debbie. 2” and “Mike 1 rock,” and so forth. I had a bookcase at home, a red enamel wood small book case of my sister’s with rocks from the geology department. I was admiring this about the time I almost burned our house to the ground with an electrical fire.
Our 5th grade teacher was Mrs. Lorraine Jay, wife of a researcher in the UM School of Education. Mr. Jay wanted to test whether certain students could learn 3 years’ material in 2 years. In other words, I and about 25 other students were given grades 4, 5, and 6 in two years, so that we could enter 7th grade when our peers in a control group were entering 6th. I did not do well so I entered 6th grade at the end of the experimental period. My mother was kind of angry at Mrs. Jay. Most of my peers did go into 7th grade.
I went into 6th grade and got punched in the nose. Hard. A young man from Tennessee, George Donham, new to town, invited me over after school. I played their Hammond electric organ expecting them to ask me to go home. Instead, they allowed me to keep playing. After supper my friend escorted me to the door and once outside, put on a cotton glove and punched his fist into my face, breaking my nose and knocking my head into the garage wall. I remember blubbering, looking down at the blood spattering on the concrete, and jogging home. My brother Tom (high school sophomore) made fun of my face because my lip was swollen. The grocer at the store (Sunshine Store) across the street said he thought it looked like someone had “bopped me” on the nose when I tearfully asked him how I looked. I have alternated between acceptance and anger. (I richly deserved it. That son of a bitch!) My nose still is misshapen. That is life. I often thought the evil done to me was done to another. In Memphis in 1970 a fellow Marine was harassing me about whether I had any balls and I socked him in the nose. I later saw him on base with a nose splint and that is when I realized that I had done him at least as much harm as the guy in the 6th grade. Karma. I can say I am sorry I socked the guy in Memphis. Also, I have to mention that the guy in the 6th grade in Missoula is one I wrestled with and nearly broke his arm using a painful hold. Perhaps the pain I put him through by trying to bend his arm the wrong way against his elbow was equal to the pain I felt when he broke my nose? I dunno. I do know that he ended up in Warm Springs mental hospital in Montana. Now I know that he died at age 51 in East Missoula. And so on and on.
I thought of Bud today when I was looking at our bowl made from an African creature’s horn. Bud’s army buddy Bill Moomey’s wife Doris and my sister Carol bought the bowl for us in 2006 when we first visited them in Kearney, Nebraska. Carol and Doris went shopping while Bill and I stayed back and looked at black and white WW II photos.
Bill said he believed the SS Leopoldville sinking with the 763 soldiers lost from the 66th Division saved him and the other survivors from having to fight in the deadly Battle of the Bulge. Instead the 66th Division went to St. Nazarre and Lorient, France, to contain the Nazis who lived in extremely well-fortified submarine facilities. When Bill told me this he broke down. I was soon crying too.
I was about 16. Winter of 1965 in Dillon Montana, noted for its cold winters, I helped my friend Duck deliver newspapers, the Butte Standard. I had an electric alarm clock that had belonged to my mother. Snooze bar on top. I’d set it for about 2 hours earlier than I wanted to get up so I could hit the snooze 4 or 5 times. Downstairs in our rented house my brother Tom had been up all night reading and thinking. The time I remember he was sitting before the fireplace playing our grandmother’s guitar. Joan Baez was news then. She sang ballads. Tom knew who Bob Dylan was, but he didn’t own any records. I just remember coming down the winding carpeted stairs. There was Tom in the flickering light of the fireplace. He had a red hot poker that he was burning dots into a log. He stopped and played a song called “The Silkie,” a kind of monster on the land and sea. Then I got on my jacket and went downtown to get my friend’s bundles of newspapers. I delivered to Barrett’s hospital and the Western Montana College. Also a bunch of houses around that area.
My grandparents Carl and Ellen Bonde were silver and beautiful. In Missoula in 1957 I wanted to impress grandpa that I played little league baseball.
I did not. I swiped my brother’s mitt. I got signed for a team up thanks to my neighbor on the block Jimmy Gall who did play. Jimmy tried to play catch with me but his baseball was hard and it hurt me when it hit me, bouncing off his right-hand glove that I tried to wear on the left. Into my face.
I didn’t like to play with Jimmy out in the hot sun where he hurt me with the hard baseball. I liked his sister Martha better, but Jimmy didn’t let me play with her. Also, Jimmy’s little brother Billy was too young to play.
Here’s the rub: my silver grandparents were my late Uncle Bud’s parents, the ones who never talked about him, the ones who didn’t know what happened to him, other than he was lost when a ship was torpedoed in WWII in the channel. Here’s the rub: I now know more about Bud’s fate and his final months of army experience than his parents ever did. I’ve been to Cherbourg out in the channel in 2007. I’ve talked to his friends in Sarasota Florida in 2006. Finest guys I’ve ever met.
I didn’t stay with little league baseball more than a few weeks. My friend Jimmy Gaul broke the news to me that I did not make the team. “Don’t cry,” he said. I was nowhere near tears. I simply didn’t care and I was relieved that I would not have to go stand in right field near the fence any more. A kid who played on the team announced that his socks were rotten. I thought “that is what real players say.”
The niece of someone lost Christmas Eve 1944 found my blog “insearchofbud” and posted a comment. Of course I ran to my plastic bin full of books, clippings, letters and other materials. Time is running short. The survivors of the torpedo sinking the SS Leopoldville are mostly 90 years old and older.
I am pleased that the niece of PFC Heinz George Rodies, Co L, 262nd Regiment, 66th Panther Division, found this blog that tells about finding a family hero lost almost 70 years ago. PFC Rodies’ name is listed on the memorial Wall of the Missing at the cemetery at Colville-Sur-Mer, Normandy, at Omaha Beach. Six years ago I placed a wreath in the water above the place where PFC Rodies and hundreds of others’ bodies remain under 150 feet of water. The wreckage of the SS Leopoldville has been designated to be an American military cemetery, although it has been dived many times.
Taken in 2013
I remember watching a circus parade in front of our house. I was a little boy, of course, but my older sisters brought me out on the side of the street to watch a man riding an elephant. My sister Carol was only a year older. My cousin Sig lived with us then. His mother died of influenza in the epidemic, as did my older sister Ruth Carol. Childhood was such a mixed bunch of memories. I remember my mother cooking and cleaning our house. She had very little patience with me when I tracked in much or sand. The lot across the street had weeds and bugs and wildflowers. I picked them for mother. She was young and beautiful and my dad worked for Kalispell Grocery, taking orders for stores to keep them stocked. He traveled from Kalispell to Libby, Polson, Columbia Falls and Hot Springs. He bought a place on Bitterroot Lake where he built a little cabin for us to visit in the summer. What a great childhood with my older sisters Helen and Corinne. Trouble is, they were so much older they moved away before I got to high school.
insearchofbud 