soulmailing

Postcard of English cricket match

In his tenderly reverent ballad “Remembrance Day,” Mark Knopfler honors the fallen soldiers of World War I by calling to mind the players on a village cricket team:
Standing at the crease, the batsman takes a look around/ The boys are fielding on home ground, the steeple sharp against the blue/ When I think of you
Sam and Andy, Jack and John, Charlie, Martin, Jamie, Ron … on and on/ We will remember them, remember them, remember them
Together with a haunting melody, Knopfler’s lyrical guitar lines and a children’s choir, the song evokes an image of one of those pretty English villages in the Cotswolds, its male population devastated by a brutal war, the reason for which most people still don’t know.
The national holiday of which Knopfler sings is this Sunday, Nov. 11, the same date as Veterans Day in the U.S. In the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries, Remembrance Day honors those who have died in war. It’s marked by a moment of silence at 11 a.m., the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month on which the Armistice ending World War I took effect.
It’s also marked by red poppies, a reference to the famous poem “In Flanders Fields” by Lt. Col. John McRae, a Canadian physican who fought in the ghastly second battle of Ypres in the Flanders region of Belgium. Somehow McRae managed to write these immortal lines while presiding over the funeral of one of many friends whose graves were overgrown with poppies:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow/ Between the crosses, row on row/ That mark our place …
Like Knopfler’s song, McRae’s poem gives life to the fallen by recalling them in their full flower of life:
We are the Dead. Short days ago/ We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,/ Loved and were loved, and now we lie/ In Flanders fields.
The power of such words of remembrance lies in their ability to conjure the fragile glory of life and the faces of loved ones who have passed on, whether in battlefields or the battle of life.
The song of Knopfler, a gifted guitarist and songwriter who played at Van Andel Arena on Monday, Nov. 12, adds the power of memorable melody.
Listening to Knopfler’s heart-piercing solo, I think of my friend Andy Angelo. Andy was a gentle man who was my editor at The Grand Rapids Press for many years. He died July 3 at age 55, felled not by a bullet but by respiratory problems. I need not add the overused “much too soon,” but that was certainly the feeling among his stunned coworkers and many community friends.
My mind recalls Andy not in his Blodgett Hospital room, but sitting at his copy desk, leaning back with a big grin and saying to me, “Whatcha got?” Usually I had a gripe about some lame copy editor meddling with my perfect prose. Andy never snapped, Jason Robards-style, but quietly went about seeing if he could fix it.
Others remember Andy very much alive as well. The Cook Arts Center, of which he was a longtime supporter, built an altar in his honor at the Grand Rapids Public Library for the Mexican Day of the Dead early in November.
Knopfler’s song also brings to mind other fallen loved ones, including my mother and father. They sometimes dance through my dreams, alive and vibrant as the sun. Although painful scenes of their deaths sometimes appear, I choose to remember them in life, at play and in love — sitting around the kitchen table, playing cards, dancing on New Year’s Eve, dad firing a baseball in the side yard.
I have many physical remnants of their lives: photos, letters, a few tape recordings. But they mostly reside in my memory. It’s there they live most vibrantly and vividly and intimately. My memory of Mom and Dad, and of Andy and other loved ones, is a sacred hall, a sanctuary lighted by sunlight slanting through the stained-glass scenes of their lives.
My remembering them is something holy, a gift from God that enables life to go on for them in me. It is a gift I share with my brother and sister and friends and my beloved Andrea, and pass on to my children, Emily and Max.
“God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December,” said James M. Barrie, the author of “Peter Pan.”
And so we might have poppies in November, and our loved ones always, as long as we live.

He graced right field like Fred Astaire

Oct. 28, 2012, pre-game:
Tonight, for Game Four, I am holding the Kaline Ball.
Saturday night I held the Ernie Harwell/Alan Trammell ball for Game Three. Didn’t work. Despite keeping it right in front of me the whole way, and with a roomfull of friends all decked out in Tiger regalia, my team went down 2-0 to the suddenly stupendous San Francisco Giants. Just as suddenly, the World Series shrank down to one game, a loss in which would relegate this one to Tigers infamy.
A sweep? Inconceivable! Not my Tigers. Clearly, stronger stuff is needed to bring the mojo back to Detroit and the hits back to Tiger bats.
It’s time for the Kaline Ball.
The Hall of Famer signed the ball in a reunion day for the 1968 World Champion Tigers that was held some years back at Tiger Stadium. My Dad and I lined up for the autographs of Al and other Tigers from that team, including John Hiller, Jon Warden and Daryl Patterson.
When I told Patterson his team had created great memories for me that summer, he cracked, “You probably remember more of it than I do.” The ’68 Tigers were well-known for partying.
Patterson’s signature shares the slightly scruffed Little League ball with several other scrawly autographs. But Al Kaline’s name clearly owns the ball, elegantly occupying its own space between the seams, just as he occupied right field like no other player of his time, fielding flies and firing bullets with the grace of Fred Astaire.
The ’68 Tigers were my team, the guys I’d grown up with, scored games for, imagined myself as in backyard games of whiffle ball. I collected their cards for 5 cents a pack. Willie Horton, Norm Cash, Mickey Stanley, Mickey Lolich, Denny McLain: I can still recite their season stats with greater accuracy than I can recall what I ate yesterday.
Those Tigers occupy the same place in my heart as the Tigers of 1935 did for my Dad. The players of that incredible team loom in my mind like legendary ghosts: Charlie Gehringer, Hank Greenberg, Mickey Cochrane, Schoolboy Rowe, Tommy Bridges. Dad saw them win Detroit’s first World Series, and talked of them often as we watched the ’68 team beat the Cardinals.
Here we are 77 years later, in a world unimaginable to a 14-year-old boy winging the Detroit Free Press onto porches from his bike. I don’t really understand the changes any better than Dad did. But I am grateful that the old English D on the Tiger uniforms remains, occupying its own space on the pristine white jersey.
Do I believe holding the Kaline Ball will make a difference tonight? It’s not a question of belief. It’s just what baseball fans do. When Armando Galarraga was on his way to his shoulda-been perfect game in June 2010, I did not move from my position in the recliner for the final two innings. Didn’t even take my chin off my hand. How could I take the chance?
So here we go: the National Anthem is being sung with soulful wails. The players hold their hats over their hearts. The game is about to begin, in ridiculously cold weather in Comerica Park.
No team has ever come back to win a World Series from a 3-0 deficit. But certainly no World Series game has ever been watched by this fan holding a ball signed by Al Kaline.
Anything can happen. It’s baseball, after all.
Postscript, Monday, Oct. 29 (the bleak morning after): Kaline Ball not enough. But I held it anyway, finding comfort in its perfect, familiar solidity. It felt like history, a great game, memories of my Dad. That was enough, until next year.

He knew he was a man, but had the wrong brand

It’s time I rebranded myself. I’ve been the same brand for 35 years, and it’s not a very interesting one: Plain White Reporter Guy. There’s nothing wrong with that brand, but it doesn’t sell me at all. Many thousands of plain white reporter guys already are on the market. What do I have to offer that they don’t?
The truth is, all these years I didn’t even know I had a brand. I thought I was just living, working, raising a family, that sort of thing. It never occurred to me that I was a commodity, and a valuable one at that. I could do many things well. I had skills, experience and learned quickly. There was a lot to recommend me. But I just trudged along, living day by day, as if that were all there was to life.
Luckily, I finally woke up, shortly after my job went away. What is your brand? my friends started asking. What is your skill set? What do you have to offer the increasingly global marketplace? Just who are you, anyway?
It took me awhile to accept the idea that I needed to be branded. I associated the very concept of branding with the old TV show, which was actually called “Branded.” It starred Chuck Connors, who had been unjustly branded a coward by the Army and spent two seasons wandering around trying to prove his critics wrong. “What do you do when you’re branded, and you know you’re a man?” the theme song asked. Today, you would rebrand yourself.
One of “Branded”’s guest stars was Delores del Rio, a silent movie siren, Latin lover and Mexican vixen. She had a very strong brand.
So anyhow, once I realized I had a brand, I knew I needed a new one. Although at first I thought I might just repurpose myself: take my skill set and apply it to something else. Being a reporter entails many useful skills, such as quick thinking, sloppy handwriting and the ability to ask a lot of questions. I can see these being valuable for some other line of work – say, being a family doctor, a psychologist, or a Department of Social Services intake worker. Give the right set of circumstances, I could even be a magician.
But no, rebranding is the way to go. It’s a necessary transformation for re-entering the job market at midlife, especially when you didn’t foresee leaving the job market to begin with. Repurposing is just like putting on different clothes, whereas rebranding is putting on completely new underwear, changing aftershave and altering your personality.
The question is: What should my new brand be? What should it look, taste, feel and sound like? Should it be a sexy brand or a distinguished brand? An aggressive brand or a mellow brand? A brand that says, “This guy will go to the mat for you 24/7”? Or a brand that says, “This guy doesn’t need you, but maybe you need him”?
How does one build a new brand, anyway? Does one look at many other brands, identify their defining qualities and then incorporate many of those fine qualities into a distinctively personal whole new brand?
If so, I would start with the brand of Founders beer. Founders beer offers the best of both worlds: microbrewed in Grand Rapids, Michigan, yet available across much of America. Reliably delicious yet unmistakably distinctive. Diverse varieties such as “Red’s Rye,” “Dirty Bastard” and “Devil Dancer,” yet all sharing that familiar Founders after-taste. Actually, that’s the best of about six worlds. I would like all those qualities in my brand: diverse, distinctive, good aftertaste.
I would also like to import some of the Tim Hortons brand. Tim Hortons offers delicious coffee without the snooty attitude of Starbucks, as if coffee were some sort of social good. It’s just coffee, for cripe’s sake. Plus, Tim Hortons has really good pastries but doesn’t hit you over the head with them like Dunkin’ Donuts. And, Tim Hortons is Canadian, giving it an automatically nice quality, it’s named after a heroic hockey star, and you don’t run into one every time you turn around. You’ll be driving down the turnpike and suddenly exclaim, “Hey look, they’ve got a Tim Hortons!” I would like my brand to generate that same kind of delighted excitement.
Finally, I want to build my brand largely around the brand of my cat, Abbey. Abbey embodies many qualities worth emulating. These include serenity of outlook, consistency of schedule and a subtle sense of superiority that, when pushed, can result in hissing. Also, the ability to look out the window for long periods of time. I am barely worthy to tie the shoes of Abbey’s brand, but I would like to repurpose part of her brand to help build my brand.
Beyond that, I’m open to suggestion. Rebranding oneself is no small matter, and I intend to take my time with it. To be perfectly frank, I’m not all that anxious to get started. Because what if I choose the wrong brand? I’ll have to spend years trying to prove my critics wrong.

You loved kittens

You loved children and kittens
You tucked me in and calmed my fears
You taught me how to cook tomato noodle soup
You packed my lunch every day
You gave me your butterscotch pudding when I spilled mine and bawled
You played the piano with gusto
You listened to music with eyes closed
You laughed like a little girl
You kissed me one New Year’s Eve before going out with Dad
You bragged about me, and Mike, and Maureen
You took on the big boys fearlessly
You read your Free Press like a Bible
You comforted me when I cried about my lost sports career
You listened to Emily sing like she was Beverly Sills
You listened to Max play piano like he was Van Cliburn
You praised my articles like I was Mike Royko
You laughed till you cried at “Best in Show”
You left me phone messages that began with “Hey Char!”
You would visit and later say, “Your Father and I thought that was just a perfect day”
You lighted up like the sun and kissed me when I came to visit
You loved my friends
You listened to my band
You came to my rescue
You ate pie before the night of your heart operation
You watched Valverde close another game in your last week
You said you were ready to cross the river
You come to me now in my dreams
You speak to me now when I need you to
You are still with me, and always will be
You are my Mom, and I will always miss you
– July 10, 2012

Sherwood Forest by night, photo by John Sinkevics

Girls just wanna have fun, boys just wanna be dumb, and writers just want to write. Better yet, they want people to read their writing.
This is what a devoted diaspora of now-freelance journalists continues to do in West Michigan. We join legions of writers nationwide set loose into the marketplace by the downsizing of the newspaper industry. Nobody’s sure whether newspapers will survive in the long run, but you can bet that writers will still write wherever and in whatever form they can.
We pin our hopes on our passion for words, the belief that someone will always want to read them – and on our faith that the writing and reading of stories can still make a difference.
Let me introduce you to two of these talented and faithful freelancers: John Sinkevics and Ruth Butler, both longtime friends, smart observers of this thing called life, and truly gifted writers.
John – better known as Sink to his friends and coworkers — is my intrepid bandmate for 26 years in our eternal garage-rock project The Honeytones, and former longtime music critic for The Grand Rapids Press/Mlive. Besides playing a mean keyboard and belting out surprisingly savage vocals on “Beds Are Burning” and “Hey Bulldog” – not to mention playing through a downpour at Festival one year and draining the rain off his keyboard — Sink is a consummate pro and skilled, insightful reporter.
Since leaving the Press earlier this year, he has maintained a music blog, Spins on Music, which you will find in my blog roll. It is an entertaining and reliable guide to the latest in the West Michigan music scene, continuing John’s faithful coverage that earned him an award at the WYCE Jammies this year. From troubadours and guitar heroes to sound guys and promoters, Sink knows local music like the back of his keyboard, and it shows in Spins on Music.
Recent entries include a piece on the regrettable closing of the Ottawa Tavern as a jazz club – when will such a thing take hold in our fair city? – and the carryings on of the Electric Forest festival in Rothbury. Aided by a smartly composed video, John helps us city slickers envision what goes on up there in the woods. To me, it looks like Tolkien’s elvish realm of Lothlorien invaded by percussion-hammering, hula-hooping hippies and light-show wizards from the Sixties Fillmore Auditorium.
It’s altogether entertaining and informative, taking me places I couldn’t get to but can experience a bit of thanks to Sink.
If Sink’s writings take him from jazz clubs to Meijer Gardens to forests where the wild things are, Ruth Butler’s musings take us from pop culture to politics to the little annoyances-slash-blessings of daily life.
Ruth Ann, as I affectionately call her, is well-known in these parts as a longtime columnist for The Press, and a TV critic for many years prior. She was also my editor on the religion beat, gently correcting my mistakes, suggesting improvements and saving me from embarrassing foolishness in print.
Ruth and I go back a long ways, including years working in the features department formerly known as Flair. There we enjoyed sparring, over our desks and occasionally in print, on issues of the day great and small. OK, mostly small, like the real reason men wear neckties (you’ll have to ask Ruth).
Ruth, like me and several others, took a voluntary buyout from The Press in 2009. She now maintains a freelance blog and smartly designed Web site, also to be found on my blogroll.
Here, in a regular Sunday column and other postings, Ruth zeroes in on issues sometimes overlooked by the major media. She recently and rightly zeroed in on Ann Romney  for her flippant comment that she loves the fact some women don’t have a choice but to work and still raise kids. Writes Ruth, “As in: I LOVE the new Coco-inspired jewelry.” Ouch!
Ruth Ann also took a well-aimed and fully deserved shot at our state legislators who silenced the Rep. Lisa Brown for using the word “vagina” in debating an anti-abortion bill. In her usual cut-to-the-chase style, Ruth wryly observed, “mentioning body parts is only offensive in places where people have the power to make laws regarding them.” Ouch again!
Whether commenting on the halls of power or the woodland playgrounds of hipsters, Ruth Ann and Sink have things to say well worth reading. As a fellow writer in the freelance wilderness, I highly recommend their words. I guarantee you’ll find them agreeable and informative company.

As I run downhill into the great wide green park, a Tom Petty song pours through my earbuds:
I got someone who loves me tonight
I got over $1,000 in a bank, and I’m all right
Look deep in the eyes of love
And find out what you were looking for
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
And I ain’t comin’ down
My running takes me past a couple chatting by a pond, parents pushing little ones in strollers, a woman laying out picnic fixings. I’m pulled by the sights before me and the sounds playing in my head. The body obeys my will, legs pumping, lungs huffing, skin sweating. A minor miracle that I am still running after all these years. My knees should be gone by now, or my wind, or my will. But someone ran before me, showing me the way.
Running under the mighty maple and oak trees of the park, I feel sheltered by their roof of leaves and their ancient strength. I always run underneath them in an invisible path known only to me.
My iPod summons “He’s Gone Away,” a lovely instrumental by Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden, just as I am passing by a picnic table in a tree-sheltered glade. I know I must stop and sit here. This is the tune we played at my father’s memorial service as soundtrack to a slideshow of his life. My sister chose it because it was this album, “Beyond the Missouri Sky,” that gave her comfort night after night following Mom and Dad’s passing.
I first sit, then lie on the rough wooden table, looking up through the canopy of leaves at the sky above. Patches of bright blue are flecked with soft white clouds blowing by from north to south. Here, the sky speaks to my mind.
I love this sky because Dad taught me to; I adore these mighty trees because he fought forest fires as a young man; rest from my running because he circled the track every day between classes at MSU. I love listening to this song because mom played “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?” and “Moonlight on Vermont” on the baby grand piano she inherited from grandma, who played ragtime at the New Year’s Eve parties.
The sun starts to glow behind a cloud, then breaks clear into open sky, gloriously, blinking through the roof of leaves overhead. I weep because this is the heart they gave me, easily moved by the mystery of the world and the emotions welling deep inside.
All these feelings, gifts, inclinations, wonderings, came from them, to me. And all of it came from God, through Mom and Dad, through me, to my children, to all my loved ones.
Why do I say it all comes from God? Because I choose to. It is one of the few decisions over which I have any say, and I say it every day.
My iPod summons U2, and I know I must lie a moment longer.
I was speeding on the subway
Through the stations of the cross
Every eye looking every other way
Counting down till the pain will stop
At the moment of surrender
Of vision over visibility
I did not notice the passers by
And they did not notice me
The breeze dries my tears and cools my sweat. I sit up. No one passing by. It is time to run again.
So run I do. It’s what I was made for.

Memorial Day, 2012:
One of the few clear images I have of Dad in World War II is of him slung into a kind of hammock, reading below deck of the USS Cabot in the South Pacific. It was a secret spot of refuge for him amid the daily insanity of warfare. Reading provided him a respite from the rigors of the world, as it had since he had read Jack London, Zane Grey and Alexander Dumas as a boy.
A less romantic image is of Dad sitting on the long trench-like bench that served as a latrine on the aircraft carrier, looking straight across at a fellow serviceman on the opposite latrine who was blowing cigarette smoke into his eyes.
Dad hated war. Like many WW II veterans, he didn’t much talk about it and certainly didn’t glamorize it. He’d go into it if we asked him to, and in later years upacked more detail than we three kids had heard before. He wasn’t particularly proud of what he’d done as a radioman and tail gunner on a torpedo plane; he may, in fact, have felt a little shame about it. Dropping torpedos and depth charges to kill other people was not consistent with his character.
But Dad had signed up for the Navy gung-ho, as many did in those days. In the car on a date with Mom and their good friends Mary and John Read, he heard the radio report of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Right then, he told me years later, he knew what his future was.
Here is the account my sister, Maureen, gave in “An Album of Memories: Personal Histories from the Greatest Generation,” a compendium of letters by and about WW II vets compiled by Tom Brokaw:
“My father gave up his summers fighting fires in the national park system and interrupted his college education at Michigan State to enlist after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He tried to join the Marines as an expression of his desire to fight, but a heart murmur kept him out, to his great disappointment. My grandfather wanted him to sign up for officers’ school when he joined the Navy, but Dad wanted to be one of the ‘grunts.’ He was 20 years old.”
That last line slays me. Dad was barely beyond boyhood when he went to battle, as have been so many, then and now, who put their lives on the line for us. No questions asked, he went to war to save the world from murderous madmen. Dad would always downplay that heroic role, but I never let him get away with it.
This day memorializes those who died in trying to protect the rest of us. Like Dad, I hate war. I believe wars are almost never necessary and usually serve ignoble ends. My brother, Mike, served his country as a conscientious objector to Vietnam, doing civil rights work in the South. I shared his objection, though I honor those who risked and lost their lives doing what they felt needed to be done for all of us.
But I believe WW II was a necessary evil. I will always feel grateful to those who waged it both at home and abroad.
Dad’s service is modestly recorded in his flight log book, marking down every sortie he made from May 1943 to September 1944 — 543.9 hours in all. There, in his remarkably neat handwriting, one sees many of the historically crucial engagements the Cabot made in the South Pacific theater: Truk, Tinian, Palau, “shelling Iwo Jima,” “found two men in raft from last nites raid.” The Cabot later received a Presidential Unit Citation, one of three light carriers so honored in World War II.
On Jan. 31, 1944, Dad wrote this entry: “CRASH LANDED IN WATER.”
Although Dad did not die in the war, he came plenty close when his plane hit the drink upon returning from a mission. Dad and his pilot survived by inflating “Mae West” flotation devices and lying on their backs to absorb the shock waves of the sinking depth charges. Dad’s crew mate, Tom Wolf, did not.
In the last year of Dad’s life, the pilot wrote him a letter confessing his guilt about Wolf’s death. Dad called him to reassure him it was not his fault, perhaps salving a wound that had festered for half a century.
There’s so much we don’t know about what our fathers went through in that war, nor our mothers. They did what they had to do. The lucky ones returned to have families and build a life for us, their children.
Most of what Dad went through in the war, as a young man flying through shrapnel and making daily sorties into hell, I never will know. Dad didn’t want me to.
Yesterday, my sister and brother and I visited Mom and Dad’s gravesite for the first time. The VFW had planted a flag next to Dad’s name. We were a little surprised, and certainly grateful, to see the miniature stars and stripes fluttering in the warm breeze next to our dear father’s name.
Other flags fluttered over other graves in Williamston’s Summit Cemetery, modest markers of the sacrifices people from this small Michigan town made for their country.
Most of what they gave, in war and at home, we will never know.