Racial/Tribal Memory

1758tribe//01/2018

The Tribe

There is an ancient tribe living among us. Their language is the oldest continuously surviving western language, matched only in the East by Chinese.  Unlike other tribes which had religions focusing on idols and statues, the God this tribe worships is invisible and portable.

It had to be. If your god was a huge statue of the Buddha and you suddenly had to leave the country, you could not take your idol with you. Conquerors traditionally destroyed the resident idols and erected their own. This tribe, having no idols, could leave and retain their identity.

What they do have is their book. They are sometimes called “people of the book.” Their book is a strange collection of stories of dysfunctional families, brothers murdering brothers, adultery, incest, concubines and expulsions, indentured servitude and betrayal, all written in the ancient language filled with ambiguity and subject to endless interpretation. Yet in spite of that difficulty, that tribe’s book has been endlessly translated, cherry picked, and adopted even though the tribal members themselves are often shunned and persecuted.

The rules of ethics and behavior laid down in that tribal document are the foundation of western civilization.

Unlike tribes where the leaders demand absolute obedience without question, this argumentative tribe has always been taught to questions and challenge, in a word to think, to learn, and, since their book is so difficult to fully understand, to study. They seek knowledge.

It’s a winning discipline,

The tribe’s peculiar customs have kept them apart from their neighbors. For this they have been suspect. They have been persecuted for their beliefs and expelled, exiled, even murdered. In turn they have been expelled and enslaved by the Romans, the Spanish, the French, the Germans and the English. There was even a program to exterminate all of them.

Are they so different? So dangerous? They do not seek to conquer or to dominate. Their prayers are always for peace. When they are successful they are the subject of envy. People think these tribal members are smart.

There is nothing remarkable about that: they seek knowledge. By Darwinian survival of the fittest, the many expulsions have purged  the tribe of the weak and the slow-witted.

So who are these strange tribal members and what is their language and their book? The language is Hebrew. They call their book the Torah and they are Jews. Who would have thought?

Trauma

1756trauma/927 words

Aug. 3, 2018

Trauma

By

Harley L. Sachs

Most of us have heard of trauma centers, hospitals that deal with emergencies, people rescued from airplane crashes, horrible highway accidents. Those traumas are physical and no doubt may be followed up with fear of fires, fear of getting in the confines of an airplane. Flashbacks.

There are other traumas, traumas  not brought on by physical stress. While the body  can recover from physical injuries, psychological damage may be life long. Military commonly suffer PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. the effect of long term fear   and the shock of seeing your buddies blown to bits before your eyes.

Not everyone has to be in battle to suffer that kind of trauma. My wife has never gotten over the shock of her mother’s early death. She had not been kind to her mother, and has been plagued by guilt ever since.

Loni, a neighbor on our floor in this retirement building, is an ethnic German who was in an eastern bloc country at the end of World War II. Many people do not know that when the war ended and the German occupiers went home, the local populations of countries that were the victims of the war turned on the ethnic Germans, some who had been there for generations. The  Russians, new occupiers, gave the locals three days to do as they wished to the ethnic Germans. Anyone who spoke German was subject to abuse, rape, imprisonment in old concentration camps, and killed. Survivors were deported. At  the end of World War II about forty million people were displaced, many of them ethnic Germans no longer welcome.

Loni and her family fell into Russian hands. Her brother went to a Russian prison camp. She became a child laborer on a farm. The trauma of that experience as a displaced child has stuck with her ever since. She has never told her son about it and cannot go to a movie with anything about war. Loni is psychologically wounded much like many combat veterans. The shadow of that early trauma hangs over her.

I have not been in a car or plane crash and never served in combat. The idea of childhood trauma seemed foreign to me, until I remembered.

They say a child’s personality is set at the age of five and view of the world at age ten. Before age ten we are not aware of the world outside our family.  What, then, happened to me?

My father was from Poland and came to the United States during World War I. Most of his extended family remained in Poland. The Germans invaded in 1939 and we did not enter the war until December 1941, so I was nine or ten during that brief interlude, 1939 to 1941 when we were not in the war yet but mail could be delivered from Poland..

My father got a letter that was sent to his mother in Chicago. It was from a neighbor in Poland, probably a suburb of Warsaw. I don’t know if it was written in Polish or Yiddish, but I do remember my father cried for three days. His uncles, aunts and cousins were all dead.

I had never seen my father cry, which is upsetting enough. Then my mother told me what was in the letter. Twenty four of his family had been slaughtered, beaten to death on the street, their house set afire. A baby had been thrown into the burning house, was rescued by one of the boys but the baby was thrown in again. The boy, one of my father’s cousins, tried to save the baby again but was burned alive.  

At school my teacher, Miss Hill, was a Catholic and an anti-Semite. When we had a spell down and my turn came she went down the list of words and picked one I would not know: catechism.  She smirked. Defeated, I returned to my desk wondering what catechism was. A girl who sat next to me showed me her catechism book and I understood. One had to memorize the correct answers to theological questions.

When we had show and tell and it was my turn I told the class about the letter from Poland and cried. I knew that the Poles were Catholics but I did not know then why they hated Jews and would even kill them and burn their homes with the baby thrown into the flames.

That was my trauma.

It burned into my consciousness an awareness of anti-Semitism and Catholic dogma which to this day includes a prayer about “the perfidious Jews” in the Easter Latin mass.

The Catholic Inquisition of Spain that drove us out of the country in 1492 continued for five hundred years and did not officially end until 1956 when the Pope declared that today’s Jews were not personally responsible for the death of Jesus. I never thought I was, but found the pardon at least too long delayed.

That was my trauma. These scars don’t heal.

Now we have a new round of trauma against children. Over three thousand immigrant children have been forcibly taken from their parents and sent off to unknown foster homes while their parents are deported and may never return. This inhumane treatment of children, like the post World War II expulsion of ethnic Germans from previously occupied countries, will cause a lifetime of trauma. How many new Lonis has our government created?

This is not the kind of trauma that can be undone. When will we ever learn?

An image of God

1754god

July 2, 2018

God

By

Harley L. Sachs

The Bible says that God created man in his own image. I think it’s the other way around: man created god in his own image.  I once wrote a poem about a cod fish who decided that God was a cod. Why not?

As for our own mage, we have many. We are pictured in color, 3d, black and white, x-ray, and negative. Our shadows are also our images. A child might draw us as a stick figure. So which is true? Is any in God’s image?  Or are all of them? Or none?

Carl Sagan said we are the stuff the stars are made of. This is true. Every cell of our bodies contains our DNA, the blueprint for ourselves as a whole. But the DNA is made up of molecules and those are made of atoms. The laws of physics that determine those atoms are the same as those that constitute the universe. Our bodies are a manifestation of that formula. We are part of it.

 We are not constant. We are always changing. Every seven years our skin, the largest organ of our bodies, is replaced, flaking off as dander and renewed. Seen in rapid motion, our ephemeral nature would be obvious. Nothing lasts.

Physicists will point out that we are not even solid. There is space between the parts of the atoms. Cosmic rays pass right through.

Life began when molecules hooked up and reproduced, the beginning of evolution as we understand it. Eventually, here we are! The human form is a temporary coalescence of the universe’s atoms and molecules. We may die but nothing is destroyed; the atoms persist. We are truly what the stars are made of.

So where is God in all this?

God does not look like a man or a codfish. What we might call God is invisible, but it can be expressed, described not in the face of a human being or a fish, or a crucified Jew, but as a formula. Einstein broke it down into his unified field theory. E equals MC squared was an expression of energy.

The laws that Einstein expressed with chalk on a blackboard are an image of the forces that are the universe. Those forces of creation and evolution include us. We are part of it, so in that sense we are a part of God. It is the god in us.

Arthur Koestler saw this as the oceanic sense. He spoke of it in Copenhagen when I was a student there. He also wrote about it in his novel Darkness at Noon.

You can experience it yourself.

Aboard a boat at night when there is no human light pollution the stars feel so close you might reach out and touch them. When the motion of the boat defies gravity, you can feel like you are flying off into the universe. You sense that you are part of it, able spiritually to travel disemboried to distant stars.

If it must have a name that oceanic sense is the awareness of God. It is the awareness of being that transcends the body.

For me, that’s “God,” not a bearded sage or a fructicious goddess. Not a power that can be invoked through prayer to intervene in your sea of troubles. Compared with the powers of the universe, our pettiness has no consequence. With such an awareness, we can achieve serenity, the rapture.

That’s my personal path to “God.” Kabala is another. All have the same destination in mind, though for some who depend on human images, it looks like a crucified Jew. As the Shema states, “Hear o Israel, the Lord our God is one.” It is all one, even expressed in Einstein’s chalky symbols on a blackboard.

Are those blackboard scratchings an image of God? See them as a stick figure representation, like a child’s drawing of a person, but we recognize it. We can look at it and say “Yes!”

Jesse Bram and the Power of Myth

1754bram-myth

2018-06-24

Jesse Bram and Campbell’s Myth

By

Harley L. Sachs

Many of my stories begin with the question, “What if?” In The Mystery Club Solves a Murder, it’s “What if a body is found on the roof of the Rose Plaza?” In Stoprape.com it”s “What if the victim of a military rape gets revenge by putting up a web side with the perp’s picture and address? In White Slave, “What if Sutherland who fell off the yacht Miss Chief didn’t die?”Then there’s The Search for Jesse Bram. with the question “What if a space alien cadet is marooned on the planet URth?”

The Jesse Bram story has an ambiguous title. It is a search for the missing cadet and also Jesse’s search for his own identity. Inadvertently this science fiction saga fits into Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth. It is said there are only three plots for a story: boy meets girl (all love story variations), the Brave Little Tailor (a weakling slays the giant, dragon or whatever), and the man who learned better, as in Hamlet. Campbell defines them differently. Slaying the dragon is about conquering one’s self. The quest is the search for the Holy Grail. In the Jesse Bram story there are two parallel threads: find Jesse and Jesse finds out who he really is. There is also a love story, Jesse caught between his alien lover and the lovely URthling who helps him survive the atmosphere of a polluted URth.  Like many quests, cf Ulysses, Jesse encounters three temptations: the half breed caretaker of the life station and his voluptuous female, the crypto Christians who believe Jesse is Christ incarnate, and the crypto Jews who have the key to his identity. It all comes together in the climax when the searchers find him and he escapes the throng of cannibals who want to eat him to achieve salvation.

I named the main character Jesse, a variation of Jesus, and Bram. As in many of my books, Bram is a family name as I wish to keep the names of family alive if only in my books. 

In light of Campbell’s lecture on universal myths, I suspect that myth, like the life force in the earth, emerges in whatever soil it is found. Myth is a subconscious manifestation of forces that permeate our lives. It is in the nature of story telling itself. Myth is fundamental.

Bliss

1753bliss/

June 22, 2018-06-22

Bliss

By

Harley L. Sachs

When I taught at Michigan Technological University by the time the end of term came I was tired and ready for vacation. I didn’t care for attending Commencement with the tedious reading of the names of all the graduates, but on one occasion when I did go, something remarkable happened.

They were giving out the usual honorary degrees. One recipient was not scheduled to speak, but when asked if he had something to say, did. His story was an inspiration.

He had been an English foreign student, member of the fraternity down in Chassell. One of his fraternity brothers said when they graduated he was going back to Mexico to make a revolution. Would our speaker want to come along?

In those days graduates from wealthy families would make the Grand Tour, a chance for young men to see the world and sow some wild oats before returning to the firm or the estate and serious life. Our speaker wrote his father and asked if, instead of doing the Grand Tour, could he use the money to go to Mexico and make a revolution. Why not?

It’s now history. He and his two partners did make a revolution and took over Mexico. They were partners in a ranch, but when World War I intervened. he had to go back to England.

When the war ended and he returned to Mexico he discovered that his partners had been faithful. His third of their joint venture had made him rich.

He went on to success in business and philanthropy. It had all begun in Chassell, Michigan.

He had three bits of advice for our graduates: 1) Don’t worry about the money; it will come. 2) make other people happy, for their happiness comes back to you many times over. 3) follow your bliss.

Your bliss is what you really most want to do in life. It is what makes you happy and fulfilled.

For me, my bliss is to tell stories whether to a live audience or written down and published. Though I did bits and pieces of that while earning a living, I did not get to fulfill that bliss until I took early retirement. Since then I have published at least one book a year and I now read/perform my stories for live audiences.

Everyone’s bliss in what gives them joy, whether music, gardening, writing, or whatever. You must decide what your bliss is. Follow it. It is the key to your fulfillment and happiness.

Tits

1752tits/486 words

June 8, 2018

Tits

by

 Harley L. Sachs

A warning to the squeamish or faint of heart: this story may freak you out.

It’s a fact. As men grow older, besides developing a pot belly and watching your Adonis figure sag and your dingus droop, you are also going to discover that your prostate enlarges.  Nature has what appears to be a design flaw: the urethra passes through the prostate. As the prostate grows, it infringes on the urethra. Result? It may get difficult to pee. If you can’t pee at all, it time for an emergency cathartization and maybe a terp, which is a reaming out of that passage.

Side effects of a terp are bleeding, infection and incontinence. None of these sound like much fun.

An alternative is a medicine to shrink the prostate, a female hormone like estrogen. Finasteride is a powerful hormone pill so effective that a woman of child bearing age should not even touch one of those powerful little blue pills. Finasteride shrinks the prostate and takes the pressure off the urethra. You can pee again.

But it has, like all medicines, at least one side effect. Besides becoming impotent and sterile without the seminal fluid the prostate produces, the female hormone leads to what is modestly called false breasts. You grow tits.

When I first started taking that hormone I had a slight discharge from one of my nipples. For a moment I thought I’d get into the Guiness Book of Records as a male wet nurse. Didn’t happen. But I did develop some nice boobs that would be the envy of some flat chested girls.

I rationalized, I always liked boobs. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t nursed, just bottle fed as a baby. I missed out. Some man like bottoms, others, legs. I’m a boob guy.

Adolescent New York boys had the expression “to cop a feel.” I don’t have to be sneaky in a crowded subway to do that. Now I have my own!

It’s amazing.

This a side effect I can enjoy.

I mean, why risk getting slapped on the subway or charged with sexual mischief like Al Franken, Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein? I have my own boobs to cop.

It’s like a new age of discovery. The late Philip Roth built his literary career on masturbation, grossed me out. I wonder what he would have done with boobs. Maybe made a study of implants, nips and tucks like Dolly Pardon.

With me it’s not a silicone fake. My situation is not the first stage of a sex change. I’ve no impulse toward being trans or cross dressing, but it is an odd feeling, like maybe puberty, bewildering and even awesome. I never expected this benefit of old age. Sure beats incontinence. Shakespeare wrote about old age  sans teeth, sans hair. Who says growing old is always about losses.

Tits! A bonus! Remarkable.

Circumcision and the Blood Libel

1751bloodlibel /490  words

May 28, 2018

Circumcision and the Blood Libel

By

Harley L. Sachs

An open letter to all Icelanders:

There are often people who want to tell others how they should practice their religion. A case in point is the attempt in Iceland to ban circumcision, allegedly as a cruel and unnecessary operation. The real reason is likely Icelanders’ fear of Moslems taking over their country and polluting the well-regulated gene pool.

The claim is a baby has no ability to choose whether or not to be circumcised.  But neither has a baby a choice to be baptized in the Christian faith. The parents choose.

Circumcision is a widely practiced ritual performed not only by Jews and Moslems but by other cultures where it is a puberty rite. Besides serving religious and cultural traditions, circumcision is healthy, a preventive in the transmission of AIDS and other diseases.

When it comes to banning religious rituals, turnabout is fair play. Consider the Blood Libel. The earliest incidence I know is Hugh of Lincoln, mentioned in Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale. Hugh of Lincoln was a child found murdered and drained of blood. The claim was he was killed by Jews so they could use his blood in the making of matzos, the unleavened bread used in the Passover Seder. Presumably Chaucer did not know that the Jewish laws of Kashrut forbid the eating of blood. Kosher slaughter of animals  requires that no blood remains as “the blood is the life.” Jews do not eat blood pudding, blood sausage, or any food that includes blood. Who does?

The essence of Christianity is the human sacrifice of the Jew Jesus as the sole son of God who “died for your sins.” By partaking in the Eucharist, Christians  accept the Jew Jesus as their Christ Savior.

In the Eucharist participants drink “the blood of Christ” and eat “the body of Christ” a ritual reminiscent of what a tribal warrior might do when eating the heart or liver of a brave victim to acquire that person’s courage. It’s an act of cannibalism sublimated into a sip of wine and a wafer.

Bur what if, like those hysterical reactors to the Hugh of Lincoln story, Jews went berserk, rioted, and burned down churches because Christians were drinking Jewish blood and eating Jewish flesh to gain salvation? The priest solemnly offers the chalice with “the blood of Christ” and a wafer “the body of Christ.” I was there. I heard it.

It seems incredible that to drink the blood of a sacrificed Jew and eat his flesh is a way to Salvation but that is what Christians believe.

After all, how do we know it’s not just wine in that goblet but really the blood of some murdered Jew? Maybe this practice should be banned along with cannibalism.  It would prevent gullible, hysterical Jews from running amok.

We may be in the 21st Century, but atheists and agnostics notwithstanding,  ancient rituals like circumcision and symbolic cannibalism still persist.

My career in politics

1751politics/220  words

May 16, 2018

My Career in Politics

Though in a monarchy the son and heir to the throne may be a dofus, he should have grown up in a house where management decisions were made. In a democracy, however, an essential fact is that any ignoramus can be elected to office, whether to a county commission or even the presidency.

I never took government or civics in high school or college. My concentrations were in science and literature. A few years after we moved to Houghton, Michigan and a job at Michigan technological University I had no knowledge of local government and had never held any public office. I was totally ignorant.

Then at ten o’clock one night I got a call from the local Democratic party. How would I like to be a county commissioner? What’s that?

I had no idea there was a county commission or a township commission. Those local offices were unknown tome. I asked, “What does a county commission do?”

What I was told was wrong. The county commission did not control the road commission.

All I had to do was show up the next noon at the court house a couple of blocks away and sign a petition.  I was curious. Well, why not?

When I got to the court house I found that the application to be put on the ballot required a few signatures, but those five or six names had already been entered. I signed, and ta-dah! I was on the ballot. Unopposed. The Republicans had failed to call anybody.

I was duly elected to a newly formed fifteen man county board of commissioners for a two year term. My education in government had begun.

One of the first issues that came before the board was a recreation bond fund. The county was entitled to a five percent cut of tax money to be used for parks and recreation. Ah, but we had no parks and recreation commission.  We needed a Resolution.

I saw what a Resolution looked like. Seemed pretty simple: “Whereas the state… etc. and Whereas, etc. until Therefore we do establish…”  As a professor of English I volunteered to write one. Easy.

It was moved, seconded, and passed unanimously. We now had a parks and recreation commission. Then, to my surprise, because I had written the resolution and was therefore knowledgeable, I was made chairman of it.

The same thing happened when we had a chance to apply for public housing funds. We needed a housing commission and a Resolution to establish it. I wrote that one, too. It also passed. Again I was appointed chairman.

So now I was not only a county board commissioner, but also the chairman of parks and recreation and public housing. I knew nothing of those roles, either.

In Chicago those appointments might be the ticket to significant income, bribes, payola, and salaries. Not so in rural Houghton County. The county board members were not paid a salary. We got $40 a meeting plus mileage. Since I lived three blocks from the court house, I needed no mileage allowance.

Ah, well, being chairman of two commissions and a member of a third, my per meeting income was tripled.

  For Parks and Recreation I gathered a small committee of about five members. We invited proposals for the funds. We got three proposals. One was for an indoor ice hockey rink in Hancock. A second was for improvements to the Mount Ripley ski hill, part of the university.

Now I was faced with a conflict of interest. If we gave the money to the ski hill, I, as a faculty member of the university, could be accused of cronyism. If I gave the money to hockey rink, I could be seen as disloyal to my employer.

The CFO of the university appeared before our little parks and recreation commission to make the pitch. He was the chief financial officer and I was a mere assistant professor at the university. It didn’t take long to arrive at a solution. We approved all three proposals, but gave priority to the hockey rink. Naturally, the rink was built.

Though I took no credit for the hockey rink, when I visited it I felt the sense of accomplishment that comes with the power of government. You can actually get things done.

We were not so lucky with our public housing proposal. Houghton County is in the Upper Peninsula, about six hundred miles from Detroit where the HUD offices were. Though I did make a trip there, we were outgunned by the heavy clout of down state politics and money.  We might have had some support from our state senator, but public housing also has enemies: landlords who see HUD as unfair competition to private enterprise. Our application got “lost” in the files.

That, basically, was all my two little commissions were able to do in the two years I was on the county board.

AH, but the count board also ran the marina. The marina had cost the county nothing, for the land was used as an in kind contribution. The board also did play the salary of the harbor master, but the slip fees were income. There is also a launch ramp and this became a conflict.

The sea scouts were permitted to park their little sail boats next to the launch ramp, but they had to pay the $2.00 launch fee whenever they launched a boat. I asked that the scouts be given free access to the ramp. It’s important to support teenagers in an activity that is wholesome and rewarding. The board refused.

I suggested that the Marina offer a ten dollar season ramp pass for  which was the equivalent of launching a boat one a week for the short Upper Peninsula summer. The season pass was accepted.

Then  the next meeting I asked that the sea scouts be given a free season ten dollar pass for use of the ramp. For ten bucks, how could they refuse? They accepted, but they knew they’d been outfoxed.

From then on I guess I was seen as devious and dangerous.

When I two years were up I ran for reelection, but I was beaten by twenty four absentee votes, an old trick. The Republicans wanted a local person, not a university professor who might be dangerous. I was replaced by a local man who worked for the university in the maintenance shop and was related to half the town. He never did anything during his two years in office but occasionally second a motion. He actually apologized to me for having run.

I did not want to establish a fiefdom on either of the commissions and though willing to remain on them did not want to be chairman. They soon died for lack of interest.

As parks and recreation commissioner I had made it a point to visit every park in the country, every launch ramp, every beach. The exploration revealed there was choice property at White City near the Portage Entry of the waterway, close to Lake Superior, but sheltered. It was ideal for fishing, boating, and a short walk to one of the few sandy beaches in the Keweenaw. We were lucky to be able to buy a lot when they became available and spent our happiest days camping there. Had I not been on the parks and recreation commission I would never have known about it.

My income from service to the county was about $1200 a year. I knew that $40 a month could easily be piddled away, so saved it. The first summer, 1971, I spent the money on a trip to Europe for the whole family. We had a VW camper delivered in London and saved the cost of hotels and meals by living in it all summer. The second summer I spent the $1200 on a small Shasta trailer.

Ah, but my political career was not over. I was appointed to the library board. This was appropriate for a wannabe author like myself. The librarian had been in the job for about twenty-five years. The library was her life, her career. She used an old manual standard typewriter and would not go near a computer.

One of the library board members latched onto a pair of old IBN computers from the local Savings and Loan and installed them in the library. The librarian quit and never returned to the library. Not ever again.

The Portage Lake District Library is now part of the state-wide library network, connected with computers, web site, the whole technological bit. The old manual typewriter is probably gone.

My service to Houghton County was like getting a Masters degree in civics. It was a great education. The ignoramus had learned something about politics.  

goodnight kisses

1746bedtime/640 words

1/6/2018

Goodnight Kisses

By

Harley L. Sachs

When a dog gets ready to bed down for the night, I’m told she turns around three times before she’s settled. I’ve never had a dog, but recognize the role of bedtime rituals.

My bed is large, queen size. I bought it because, when my wife had her stroke, the therapist said our futon was too low for transfers from wheel chair to bed. I would need something higher, twenty-four inches, so though our futon was perfectly suitable, even after we moved from a studio to a small one bedroom, it would have to go.

We already had a memory foam topper, so I could settle for a basic bed. I ended up with a queen size mattress, with memory foam topper, and a waterproof washable cover should my wife prove to be incontinent after the stroke.

It was all to no avail, for in spite of the therapists’ determination to always be positive, as in “She’s making improvements,” she was not.  She is now in her fourth year of twenty-four hour care, served by shifts of capable helpers who hoist her out of her wheelchair or bed using a contraption called a Hoyer. The Hoyer cannot fit into my apartment.

So after fifty-five years of sleeping together, I now have to sleep alone. It is a lonely business when you’ve been accustomed to lie beside someone warm and willing for so long a time.

When I hitchhiked through Europe with two Swedish sisters, Åsa and Ingrid Henning, we were traveling companions, friends, but not lovers. As we bedded down in my inadequate,  liberated double army sleeping bag, the last act before turning in was a goodnight kiss. It was not a passionate kiss, but affectionate. To tuck in without it would be unfriendly. The goodnight kiss was like the Swedish expression, “thanks for today.”

It was the same ritual for me and my wife of over half a century. Got to have that goodnight kiss. It was essential, but for me alone in my big bed, it’s missing. That’s sad.

I’ve had to adjust to sleeping alone. Bedtime for one has become a routine. It’s a big bed, and I tend to sleep on the edge, which can be dangerous. Every year people fall out of bed and die. I know one woman who fell out of bed and was paralyzed for two years with a broken neck. Beds are not that safe. We take our chances.

I have a rather thin but usually adequate quilt. It’s not large enough for two people, and if I am not careful which way I lie with it, I can end up with cold feet. The trick is to use the quilt lengthwise with enough overlap to tuck around my feet. If not, I’ll have to resort to hospital footsie bed socks.

With my feet tucked in, left and right edges of the quilt tucked under, I work my way up, tucking both sides under me and ending with the top over my head. Hiding under the cover and breathing into the space warms it up quickly. Then I can poke my nose out .like a mouse in a nest. 

I like to sleep with a window slightly open for the fresh, cool air but by four in the morning it’s time to close the window. Sometimes the room gets too cold even with me tucked inside the quilt like a sausage. Then it’s time to break out my Pendleton wood blanket for another layer. So wrapped, I’m enclosed like in a mummy sleeping bag, cozy, cozy, but alone.

Alone, I depend on my own body for warmth. It’s not the same as when you have company, but I have no choice. For now it’s bedtime for one, no kisses. Damn.

Two Bicycles and Love

1745twobikes /1500 words

Dec. 5, 2017

Two bicycles and love

by

Harley L. Sachs

When I first saw Ursel Mathilde Hintz she was a South Schleswig girl of Danish extraction with a German passport. She spoke no English and was working as a shop assistant in a Konsum grocery store on the ground floor on Rindogatan in Stockholm. She was a lapsed Lutheran.

I was an American expatriate with a master’s degree who eked out a sort of living teaching English as a second language, two three month terms and two paychecks a year. My GI Bill had run out. I was also working under cover for the CIA. I was a secular Jew.

The only thing Ursel, known as Ulla, and I had in common was we loved to bicycle. At Indiana University I rode one of only three bicycles on the campus. Ulla had used a borrowed old fashioned bicycle to ride from her job in Sonderborg, Denmark to her home town in Germany.

In Stockholm neither of us had a bike.

After three years in Sweden, starting at the International Graduate School, I spoke Swedish. Ulla, having gone to Danish school after the war, spoke Danish and soon learned Swedish, but had not lost her accent.

When my number came up to be served at the Konsum store  Ulla asked, in the formal Swedish used in those days, “What does the gentleman wish?”

Struck by her accent I asked in the same formal way, “Is the young lady Danish?”

She blushed and I was hooked. In the land of free love and open marriages, Swedish girls did not blush. She struck me like a rose bud soon to flower in amazing ways. I wanted to be part of that. She was smart and adventurous. Wow!

It took a lot of persistence and the promise of American apple pie, home baked by this ex-GI, before she would go out on a date. She was independent and always insisted on paying her own way. For a guy who was paid only twice a year that was a good thing.

Our common languages were Swedish and German. Besides the movies, theater, and walks we soon talked about our bicycle days. I had learned that to keep your under cover informants happy in the spy business, you never forget a birthday and always remembered gifts. I bought Ulla a pair of figure skates that winter and got her a student discount on a radio. We had become a couple.

Stockholm in those days was in transition. Cold cupboards with a northern exposure were being replaced by small refrigerators. Automobiles were replacing bicycles. As the winter snow banks melted, abandoned bicycles emerged, often with no front wheel, and generally ready for the junk yard. I rescued three, took them up to my apartment above the Konsum store, and got to work. I salvaged two bikes, one a 26 inch OK boy’s and one a 28 inch woman’s Crescent.

 I bought two used wheels with pretty bad tires. The OK needed a generator and light. The women’s Crescent had a generator but no light. Both were, of course, one speeds with a coaster brake.

I could not have afforded a new bicycle, or even a used one, but with two cobbled together bikes, we were in business. When I gave Ulla her bicycle, she was delighted. I knew then that she would marry me.  

Ulla’s father was a boat builder and I had always wanted a sail boat. Every weekend we would ride those old bicycles to another of Stockholm’s many harbors and boat yards in search of a boat. I hoped that the money I had earned working under cover would be enough. It wasn’t but in the meantime we had fun looking. We even tented one night at Drottningholm on Lake Malaren, taking along a couple of toy sail boats.

Having lived through the war, Ulla was not spoiled by prosperity. Bicycling, tenting and sleeping rough wherever we could pitch the tent  were just fine.

So we fell in love in Swedish and were married in German because her father came to the synagogue wedding and that was his language. Most of our Swedish friends in attendance hadn’t a clue as the service was in Hebrew and German.

The bicycles were integral to our lives and our relationship. When we got married in May, 1960, it was the most natural thing for us to get on those old bicycles and head out, destination uncertain. Naturally, being a wannabe author, I brought along my Underwood portable typewriter on a special cargo rack over the front wheel. It was a heavy load.

We were quite a sight. Laden with everything we needed: tent, cooking gear, sleeping bag, road maps, and food, camera, and the typewriter, we peddled from Copenhagen through Germany and Holland  to the Belgian Channel ferry to England.

Fearful of the traffic on the London-Dover road, we sent the bikes by rail to London and hitchhiked to the city. Once there and with the bikes retrieved, thanks to a good map of England we discovered the Old Foss Way, a Roman road, straight to Nottingham where I had relatives.

My OK bike was not that OK, for the kid who had abandoned it had messed up the rear wheel spokes. It turned out that the number of spoke holes in the hub was not the same as the wheel rim. The spokes were not in the proper order, so were stressed, sometimes to the breaking point. I grew accustomed to replacing broken spokes. I soon ran out of spares and had some made at a shop in Uxbridge.

The rear wheel was also not perfectly round, so had a hump. This wasn’t noticeable until coasting downhill you got a bump-bump ride. The chain guard rubbed against the crank, so it was scrape-scrape with every push.

Ulla’s bike, however, ran like a Swiss watch.

The two bikes were painted the usual black with a bit of white on the rear fender. By today’s standards, they were heavy but nearly indestructible.

We spent the honeymoon winter of 1960 at Borthwick Castle where we used the old Swedish bikes to get from the gatehouse up to the Galashiels road and the bus to Edinburgh.

In the winter we lived there Ulla, always brilliant and determined, taught herself English while I struggled with a bad novel in what had been a cannon port in the basement. By the time she had our first baby her English was fluent.

When I got a contract for a year in Denmark, we had to first store our belongings.  Our possessions which had been in storage in Stockholm, came to Borthwick in an enormous crate. What about the bicycles? They were part of our life. I didn’t want to abandon them. By careful measuring, I managed to disassemble them and fit them inside the crate with boxes of books, footlockers with clothes, etc.

When we later arrived in Denmark for a year we were reunited with the bikes. They were our transportation in that city of bicycles. I rode eleven kilometers from Hvidovre to the university where I learned Danish. So now we had four languages in common.

By the time we were leaving Denmark, we had an old VW kombi to ship back to the United States. The freight company allowed us to pack the bicycles inside the car.

Unwilling to part with them, we carried them on the roof of the VW all summer in 1964. By then we had two daughters. The youngest, Belinda, fit into the bicycle basket on Ulla’s handle bar while Anna-Lena, our three year old, rode on the kiddy seat bolted to the frame.

The bicycles were part of the family, integral to our history and our romance. When we acquired water front property for camping not far from a beach, the bikes were our transportation.

We kept them even when Ulla, who fell in Florida, stopped bicycling, and my legs at age seventy were giving out.

After our fiftieth-fourth anniversary when it came time to move to Oregon, we sold all our Michigan property. What about the bikes? By now they were genuine antiques.  So were we.

I was afraid, when we sold our camp site, the bikes would end up in a ditch beside the road to be taken to the junk yard. I gave our mouse infested Shasta trailer to a young man who, it turned out, collected bicycles. He wanted them.

Those two rebuilt junk Swedish bicycles had carried us across Europe, through our honeymoon in Scotland, our sojourn in Denmark, and back to the United States. Parting with them was poignant, but I know they found a good home.

Nothing lasts. I miss the joy of bicycling, the singing sound of the Swedish knobby tires on wet pavement, the wheee of coasting downhill. Ah, but at 86 my legs have given out. The bikes lasted longer than my legs, but the memories linger on.  Ah, those memories.

The Palestinian Cottage Industry in Murder

The Palestinian Cottage Industry in Murder

In 2016 a Palestinian murdered Jewish West Point Graduate Taylor Force. Though other American Jews have been murdered in Israel in the past, this was the last straw for congress. What most Americans don’t know is Palestinian terrorists are rewarded with pensions for their families using American money. Yes, the United States gives the Palestinians aid to the tune of $350 million a year, and a big chunk of it goes to pensions for the families of prisoners who have committed terrorist acts. It’s become a cottage industry: need a pension? Kill a Jew. Congress wants it stopped and will reduce the annual budget to as low as $120 million. Abbas pleads that without those pensions for terrorist acts the stability of the Palestinian economy will be upset.  Source” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 2017

See no Evil -- a short-short story

1744seenoevil/695  words

8/18.17

See no Evil

A short story

Harley L. Sachs

As a final debriefing I had taken Harry up to the Tower for a farewell look at New York City at night. I was told his name was Harry, which is an inside joke in the company, a reference to Harry Lime of the Third Man. I this case I actually knew his real name, for we had met briefly between beers at a super bowl party. He had been there with his young wife and I didn’t linger for a conversation.

Taking agents up in the Tower on their last night has become a routine ritual for me. We don’t  want anyone to spend the last evening in a bar where they might drink too much and talk, like say where they are going the next day. Instead I take them out for a swell filet mignon dinner with red wine. I don’t claim reimbursement for the wine because our bookkeeper is a teetotaler, so I claim the dessert part of the menu and always pay cash. It’s my chance for a hundred dollar dinner before I go home to my wife who’s into chemo therapy for her breast. She’s too sick to cook and I’m no chef.

We call it simply the Tower. Used to be the Trump Tower before the assassination. Nobody lives in the penthouse any more. The building was foreclosed and bought by a shell company financed with laundered Russian money. I borrow a key to the private elevator from the building manager and take the occasional special guest up top so they can see the bathrooms. Everybody always wants to see the bathrooms and sometimes pee in the gilded commode.

So Harry and I were on the top floor balcony, looking down over the city. He said he’s leaving for Hong Kong in the morning but I know he’s flying to Moscow via Warsaw. It’s not etiquette to ask much.

The agent called Harry is in his thirties. I know his history and have to write a contact report on his last evening in the States. I make those reports as brief and innocuous as possible, just enough to justify the cost of the meal. You never know who reads those.

We were standing at the parapet looking down at the city. On a floor two stories down there was some sort of party and on that balcony there were two men who had separated themselves from the crowd. Just two men, talking.

Harry said, “Isn’t that, er, Cannon?”

“Bannon,”  I said. “Steve Bannon.”

“Oh.”

“Been in the news again.”

“Yes.”

“Not good.”

“No.”

One second there were two men down there on that balcony. Then in a blink of an eye, there was only one.

“Did you see that?” Harry asked, shocked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Shouldn’t we report it?”

“What? You report it? You’d miss your plane to Hong Kong.”

“What about you?” Harry asked.

I tapped the American flag pin on my lapel and gave him a knowing look. “Got it.”

“That your Go-pro?”

I just gave him a thin smile like don’t ask. Everyone thinks we’re equipped with button cameras and other James Bond shit.

“Oh,” Harry said.

There was a faint sound of a siren on the street down below. “We’d better go out the service exit,” I said, not wanting to encounter uniforms in the lobby.

When we reached the street I hailed a yellow cab to get him back to his hotel. As Harry got into the cab he turned and asked, “You’ll report it, right?”

I nodded.

He was off.

Before the assassination the president used to fire people. Pence just kills them.

Not my problem. I’m up for retirement soon. We have a rule: see no evil. Works for me.

A year later I learned that Harry had been killed in a car crash in Moscow. I thought it probably was a car crash. The Russians can’t afford to spend a car and driver when it’s cheaper to toss someone out a fourth story hotel window. I wondered what had gone wrong, if the man called Harry had made a mistake, or someone like Cheney had blown his cover. 

The Toilet Police

1741toilet/ 650 words

4/8/2017

The Toilet Police

 by

Harley L. Sachs

I’ve always been a guy. Even when I was only three, people used to call me the little guy. Now with all this bathroom brouhaha my guyness is in question. It’s all because of that Carolina law about who gets to use what toilet. The transgender folks, those who can’t make up their minds if they are a guy or a gal or whatever, have been persecuted. I can see that if I dressed up as a drag queen for the Moose Halloween party, it might look a bit peculiar, but even in a wig and lipstick, there’s no doubt that I would be seen as a guy. Stupid looking, comical, but still a guy. Now all that’s changed.

Now to use a toilet in some big stores you have to prove your birth gender. In Saudi Arabia they have the religious police, in case a woman shows her ankles, bare wrists, or doesn’t cover her eyes. Here it’s the toilet cops.

I was standing in line by the men’s room for my turn when I was stopped by toilet security. This was a tough looking person in a badge and uniform but of. to my mind, uncertain gender. “You have to show proof of gender,” the toilet cop said, very stern.

My gender was never questioned before. I thought it was a joke. “You want to see my circumcision scar?”

I thought it was a joke. Apparently it wasn’t. People who have undergone a sex change might have operation scars I don’t want to see under any circumstances. I have trouble enough with people who pierce their lips and noses. “

“You have to show proof of gender when you were born.”

“How do I do that?”

“Birth certificate.”

I didn’t have my birth certificate on me. Who does? If I were an immigrant of questionable legality I’d have to carry a green card or a proof of citizenship, but not a birth certificate.

Fortunately, that time my visit to the toilet wasn’t urgent. I went home and searched the file of documents, my high school diploma, my confirmation diploma from Sunday School, my military discharge DD214, and found a birth certificate issued by a Chicago clerk. I decided I’d better carry it with me at all times, just in case I’d have to pee.

Sure though, I did. This time I was in a different big box store and approached the public toilet. Again there was a toilet cop guarding the facility. This time I was ready.

“:Proof of birth gender,” I said, hoping not to be kept waiting. This time I really had to go. I showed my birth certificate. There is was: male baby complete with baby footprint.

The toilet cop was skeptical. “This is a photo copy. We only accept original documents.”

“What are you?  Ex IRS?” I once had to re-file my income tax because I sent a photocopy of the return, not one with the original signature.

The toilet cop wasn’t amused. “Got to be the original document. How do I know if you aren’t transgender?”

If I waited any longer it would be too late. I had to go, now. I gave up and hurried out the door. Round the corner, at the back of the building where there are no windows, I peed against the wall. I was in Italy once. Almost everybody pees against a wall in Italy.

Not here.

I was arrested for public indecency.

Funny thing was, they put me in a cell with several violators, some of them transgender. They’d been caught by the toilet cops without the proper birth certificates.

Nobody seemed to care in the jail. They have unisex cells.

I didn’t have cash for bail money, so I have to stay in the joint to  await my court date.  You know what they have for toilet facilities in the jail? A stainless steel commode and no privacy. Everybody uses the same one, with or without a birth certificate.

Faux Hnting

1740faux/450 words

January 16, 2017

Faux Hunting

A column by

Harley L. Sachs

When our family was in the fur business my father sold coats made from many animals. Mom had an ocelot jacket and a mink stole. I had once had a cut down raccoon coat. But we also sold Labrador seal, sheered beaver, Coney, an occasional squirrel coat, mouton lamb, almost any animal whose hide leant it to making into a coat for humans. Lions were too shaggy, but leopards were fine for coats. Mink was raised on farms just for the hides. Sable was trapped in Siberia. I suspect zebra would be too difficult to match up, what with all those stripes. Arctic fox was often sold as a scarf with a fake animal head clasp complete with glass eyes. You could even get moleskin, though it would take an awful lot of dead moles to make a ladies jacket.

Animal rights fanatics are full of beans, total hypocrites.. A cowboy wouldn’t want a plastic saddle. Saddles need to be leather.  As for the cruelty of killing an animal for its skin, in the Argentine cattle were initially raised only for their hides until they figured out that the meat could be turned into corned beef. Leather or pigskin shoes are just an animal skin with the hair removed. Shaving and pastry brushes are made of pig bristles..

Coming from that fur business background, I was stymied by the label on my new, lined boots. The label says “faux fur.” So what animal is a faux? Not a fox, too shaggy for a boot liner, and not mink, too expensive. We used to sell seal dyed Coney, a Coney being a sort of rabbit and dyed to look like seal. It was still basically rabbit.

But a faux? What animal was that?

It couldn‘t be very large, and being a mammal had to be something with four legs.

I’d heard about fox hunting, but not faux hunting.

I’d never seen a faux in the zoo, either.

Maybe the faux is something like the nauga whose hide is made into furniture. I haven’t seen naugas at the zoo, either but plenty of recliners using naugahide..

Maybe, like the Coney, those animal  skins are processed to suit the technological world we live in.  Seal dyed Coney was just a fake. Maybe the faux is, too. Maybe faux fur is really guinea pig, those cute cuddly creatures that are not actually pigs. A Coney is not a seal even if dyed that color, and a guinea pig isn’t a pig. Nobody would want to kill a guinea pig for boot liner, so they give it another name, faux. So maybe a faux is something else. Go figure.

Crony Capitalism

1739crony /220  words
Dec. 4. 2016

Crony Capitalism
A letter by
Harley L. Sachs

Donald Trump’s “saving” about 800  jobs at the Indianapolis Carrier plant from being exported to Mexico was a publicity stunt. He campaigned on a plan to stop exporting American jobs abroad, but in fact there were 2000 jobs in play at Carrier, not the 800. What about the rest? Bye-bye. Then, to sweeten the deal he got Carrier a seven million dollar tax break. The money “saved” for Carrier in fact will not go into the Indiana general fund.
Vice president elect Spense should be ashamed. As governor of Indiana, his deal with Carrier will deprive the state of needed tax income. What will it come out of? Schools? Infrastructure?
This is a typical Trump tactic: pay a bill with other people’s money and then take the credit. He did the same with casinos: borrowing money, then going bankrupt, selling at the loss of his creditors and making himself richer in the process. You can’t run a government that way. In one Southern state a Republican governor cut taxes and left office with the state bankrupt.
In the Carrier case the creditors who get stiffed will be Indiana taxpayers. Try floating a seven million bond issue for schools or roads to replace the Carrier giveaway. Lots of luck.

Here we Go Again

1737history/        

Here we go Again

A letter by

Harley L. Sachs

www.HarleySachs.com

Merkel’s government is going under to a right wing nationalist party. Why?

The new German political Party is anti-immigrant, why?

The immigrants are flooding Germany from Iraq and Syria. Why?

The Iraqis are fleeing a religious civil war; the Syrians are fleeing Assad’s regime. Why?

Iraq fell into a religious civil war because Bush and Cheney caused an invasion. Why?

The Iraq war was started because Shell and Cheney’s Haliburton lost their oil leases and contracts to Saddam.

The Syrian war started because Assad would not give his people a voice in government and declared them to be terrorists. So he destroyed his own country out of spite.

Merkel’s German government is about to go under. Italy will follow and maybe France. Britain is pulling out of the EU and Russia is threatening the Baltic States.

All because of oil rights.

Last time it was the assassination of a minor royal in Sarajevo which precipitated World War I, many millions of dead, and the redrawing of the map of Europe.

WW I ended with the treaty of Versailles which crippled the German economy, making way for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist (NAZI) party. Then it was the Jews who were the scapegoats.

The new right wing German party will go after the Moslem immigrants.

Why don’t we ever learn?

Submission to New York Times magazine

LIVES

From Tent to Castle

Harley L. Sachs

www.HarleySachs.com

     She was a shop assistant with a German passport, working for a cooperative grocery in Stockholm and spoke no English. I was an American spy at the tail end of the GI Bill teaching English as a foreign language, two three months terms a year. In three years I had learned Swedish. When my number came up to be served I recognized the clerk’s accent. In the then formal Swedish way of addressing strangers in the third person, I asked, “Is the young lady Danish?”

She blushed. I was surprised. This was Sweden, after all, the land of unabashed free love. That this pretty shop assistant could blush was intriguing. I had to know more about her.

It was my job to size people up, judge their character, know them, if possible, inside and out. I immediately saw this girl, who turned out to be from North Germany but an ethnic Dane from South Schleswig, as someone special. She was, to my mind, like a bud of a rose. I saw potential. It would be exciting to see how she would blossom. I was determined to find out.

I set about to doggedly pursue her in my broke grad student fashion. The GI bill had run out. I was paid for my language classes only twice a year. I was not someone who wooed with a bunch of flowers, a bottle of wine and a dinner invitation. Instead, every day I stopped at the Konsum store, took a number, waited until she would be the next clerk to serve. I then bought a nickel chocolate bar. Every day.

 I learned her name was Ulla. 

The store crew figured it out, of course, and teased her. Ulla refused all invitations to a movie. It looked pretty hopeless, but I was determined.

While a company clerk in the US Army in Heidelberg I had learned from our cooks the secret of making pie crust. Swedish pastry selections did not include American apple pie.  I decided to bake a couple of pies and, since Ulla refused my invitations to a movie, to invite the whole Konsum crew upstairs for some real American apple pie, a pie party.

I baked the pies and waited. The agreed time came and went. I cut a pie and had my piece, alone.  Half an hour late Ulla showed up with one of the co-workers.

After that delayed success she decided I wasn’t such a dangerous person after all. We did go to the movies with her always insisting on paying her own way, a plus for a guy who lived on two pay checks a year. That was the beginning.

We did a shakedown trip, hitchhiking to Norway and sleeping rough in a small tent, cooking over a Loma gasoline stove and getting to know each other. This was no American girl who could not live without a hot shower every day, stay in hotels and eat in nice restaurants. This was a girl who had lived through World War II in North Germany on a diet of boiled milk and potatoes in a house with no running water or plumbing. Ulla had pumped water and boiled laundry in a cauldron over a brown coal fire. She could rough it without complaint.

We were married the next year. My American and Swedish friends thought us an odd couple: a Jewish American with a graduate degree whose Polish family had been murdered and a German girl with a Lutheran background who spoke no English and whose brother had died at Stalingrad. We had a lot of points against us and we knew it.

On our honeymoon we left Stockholm on rebuilt one speed bicycles, calendar and itinerary open. Ulla had no money and I had my stash of the three thousand dollars I had put away during my three years as a contract agent. It wasn’t as crazy as it looked, for if we did go broke and get stranded I knew (but Ulla didn’t) the government would pay our fares to the United States. That failing, I had hopes of an assignment in Denmark.

We still had the language problem. We had fallen in love in Swedish and for Ulla’s father’s sake, married in German at the Stockholm synagogue after her conversion. Snubbed my my English relatives who saw Ulla as a despicable German even though she saw herself as Danish, she swore not to leave England until she learned the language.

After fifty-two days of rain in the tent in England and Scotland, we advertised for a winter layover and, because I’m an author, were offered the gatehouse of Borthwick Castle for the winter. While I wrote a bad novel in the dungeon Ulla was upstairs teaching herself English, her fifth language.

This is no Pygmalian story, for I am not her Professor Higgins or Svengali. I am her loving, devoted observer, still enchanted by that remarkable girl who once blushed in the Konsum grocery. store. We have been married fifty-six years.   

Our story, “From Tent to Castle: Memoir of a Year Long Honeymoon” is available through Amazon.com.