Friday, December 30, 2022

Thursday, December 29, 2022

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

Beefy burrito

Here's the other burrito: BB

Retrospect

I woke from a dream a few days ago.  I had gone back and spoken to my father, dead now almost a decade.  Whenever I dream of my parents (which is not at all often), I hear my mother but I don't see her.  She left me when I was sixteen.  After she passed away she became for a time in my dreams a veil-clad spirit, floating down the farmhouse staircase.

Obliquely, on the flip side of my mother's presence, I see my father in shadow, but he doesn't speak to me.  He just looks at me.  So I made communion with him, this unspeaking, staring ghost.  I took a chair.  He stayed in his corner.  I could see the outline of his body, a dark shape, and his face floating above it, half in and out of the light.

I wanted to tell him what has happened, how things have changed, how strange I feel, in a now lately stranger world - but initially I found no words to speak.  I remember swallowing and starting, but what I was saying was not how I wanted to phrase it.  I wanted to make him understand how I was - my anguish and hope.  But it was no use.  The essence of my troubles were like sand through my fingers, one's private thoughts so personal as to be unexplainable.  I was unable to express to him how I was in my heart through the dialogue I have with myself in my head.  He was, as he often was in life, unimpressed.  Then he was gone from his corner.

After waking and making some tea I realised that this had essentially always been our relationship.  Beware these men of the Greatest Generation, they are as hard as nails.

While he was ill, before he passed away, I had another dream, one that I have never forgotten.  I was on a sunny beach, but it was neither a tropical nor pleasure-giving stretch.  My clothes pressed against my body and the ends behind me snapped and fluttered in the wind.  He was neither seen nor heard, but his presence was everywhere.  There was a tower in the distance, and I was barefoot in the sand making my way toward it.  I never seemed to get close to the damn thing, never close enough to reach this tower of my father.  A few weeks later he was dead, and from then on, like my mother, only visited me infrequently in sleep.


So what to make of this year-ending dream, this sum of the year, seemingly, for me.  My ghost-of-Christmas-past father, with his abbot eyes and no voice at all?  I don't set all my cards down to Freud, as much as he has opened the box of ours minds.  No, I think I was in conference with Dad for the decisions I've made since the old world exploded a few years ago.  And I am not exactly sure yet if I made the ones to best suit me.  For, do we not do things for others, in the name of others, and to please others?  I only see a glimmer of light yet.  It's too soon to tell.

Saturday, December 24, 2022

Saturday, December 17, 2022

Captain Kermit King Beahan



Movie star handsome Kermit K. Beahan, sporting a rakish Errol Flynn moustache, was the bombardier on Bockscar, the Silverplate B-29 that dropped the plutonium implosion bomb on Nagasaki.  Flying alongside was The Great Artiste as an observation plane.  The Artiste was named for Beahan himself and his skill in targeting his Norden bombsight with deadly accuracy.  It also apparently referenced his suavity with women, which is clearly evident.  The date of the Nagasaki mission, August 9th, 1945, was also Beahan's birthday.  He was 27.

The Enola Gay has survived many an anti-nuclear protest and rests at the Smithsonian.  The Great Artiste continued in service, I suppose being a lesser-known counterpart to those historical missions.  It skidded off the runway at Goose Bay, Labrador, in 1949 and was scrapped.

Here he is with his Texan drawl, sexy slouch and goofy smile in all the youthfulness of total victory: KKB