Word of the Day

… courtesy of Merriam Webster, with slight modifications by me:

The Word of the Day for July 05, 2010 is:
ponderous • \PAHN-duh-rus\ • adjective

1 : of very great weight

*2 : unwieldy or clumsy because of weight and size

3 : oppressively or unpleasantly dull : lifeless

Felix’s Example Sentence:

Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell
Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn’d,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws,
To cast thee up again.

- William Shakespeare, Hamlet I, iv

Did you know?

“Ponderous” is ultimately from the Latin word for “weight,” namely, “pondus” (which also gave us “ponder” and “preponderance” and is related to “pound”). We adopted “ponderous” with the literal sense “heavy” from Anglo-French “ponderus” in the 15th century, and early on we appended a figurative sense of “weighty,” that is, “serious” or “important.” But we stopped using the “serious” sense of “ponderous” around 200 years ago — perhaps because in the meantime we’d imposed on it a different figurative sense of “dull and lifeless,” which we still use today.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

Amos’s Ashes

Our cat who died a couple of weeks ago, Amos, came home last Friday. The vet had sent his remains off to a pet crematory, where several of his forbearers had gone for final disposition, now residing in Barbara’s china cabinet. We picked up Amos at the vet’s, on our way to a friend’s party. Feeling sentimental, Barbara carried the container holding Amos’s earthly remains to the party, to show to friends.

Several hours later, we returned home. The next morning, the paperwork for the crematory and the small envelope containing a clipping of Amos’s fur were on the table next to the front door, but the white plastic container holding his ashes was nowhere to be found. Eventually, after exhausting all other possibilities, we found that Amos had remained behind at the party. He probably enjoyed it. Tomorrow we go back to our friend’s and reclaim Amos.

Tomorrow night, Amos will join his departed comrades, Tucker, Sam and Stella on the top shelf of the china cabinet, among various china, crystal and curio pieces, as well as a large collection of Nun dolls, statues, toys and other objects collected by Barbara over the years. This cabinet is a sort of memory bank for Barbara, holding so many things to keep her good times in mind.

Welcome home, Amos.

Fading: The Greatest Generation

Two sixty-five year marks were reached this year, one broadly historic and social, another purely personal to me. A couple of months ago, I observed my sixty-fifth birthday. Today, it has been sixty-five years since the massive invasion of Europe set in motion the last eleven months of the Third Reich.

The first two months of my life were spent in a world consumed in a colossal struggle between Allied forces and the Nazi and Japanese military machines, with most of Europe and Asia dominated by our adversaries in each theatre. Millions of men and women, including my young father, were thousands of miles away from home, forged into armies and navies contending for the future of freedom as defined by the western democracies. Truly, these millions earned the later descriptive title of “The Greatest Generation.” They fought and died and suffered wounds, prevailed in battle and returned home to build lives and a peacetime rebirth of those nations their enemies sought to destroy.

This morning, newspapers and broadcast programs reported once more on the accomplishments of this band of brothers and sisters. As has been the case increasingly over the past decade or two, mention of the thinning ranks of living veterans sounded an elegiac note. The youngest of still living veterans from that cataclysmic war are in their early eighties. Stories this morning all told of how few were still able to gather at any distance from their homes, much less re-visit the far scenes of their struggles, or the foreign cemeteries where many of their comrades have lain since after the war.

A day will come when there shall no longer be any survivors of that war, as it came for veterans of World War I, and all the other wars before. Their names will become legend, their personal memories preserved only in their families and friends left behind, for a little while.

Selah, good and faithful servants – thank you all.

Decoration Day

I title this post with the original name of Memorial Day, the holiday which by federal decree is observed each year on the last Monday of May. Originally, Decoration Day, as it was titled, commemorated those who died fighting to preserve the Union during the Civil War, with the placing of flowers upon their graves. The date fixed was May 30, for no particular reason, as far as I know. One explanation I have heard is that by that date, flowers would be in bloom everywhere in the country. This Decoration Day was decreed by the head of the GAR, the Grand Army of the Republic, an association of Union veterans, and did not include Confederate dead.

Efforts throughout the South established Confederate Decoration Day, on dates that were as independent as the former rebellious states had shown themselves. Some dates were chosen to mark prominent Confederate heroes, such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. At least one, Virigina’s Decoration Day, was set on May 30, joining the Union observation.

By the turn of the century, Decoration Day was renamed Memorial Day, and eventually became a day to commemorate all fallen soldiers of any state in any war. General George Thomas, tasked by General Sherman after the battles in Chattanooga with establishing a military cemetery, selected a site close to Orchard Knob, where he, Grant and other generals had watched the displacement of the Confederate forces from Missionary Ridge, which resulted in victory.

Thomas was a native Virginian, who elected to remain loyal to the Union rather than fight for his state. This conviction, and his no doubt difficult relations with his former brother officers who felt otherwise, and went for the Confederacy, may have prompted his famous remark to his subordinates about the layout of graves at Chattanooga. Asked if the dead were to be grouped by their units, raised from each of their native states, Thomas reportedly said, “No, No, mix them all up. I’m sick of state’s rights.”

Thomas’s view was not shared in regard to the Confederate dead, and no rebels were buried in the Chattanooga Cemetery to my knowledge. Only after the first World War were all the dead of all the wars commemorated together on Memorial Day. I hope that a few old Confederates may have rested with their adversaries at Chattanooga at last. There is a Confederate Cemetery out at Silverdale, east of Chattanooga, kept up by the Chattanooga Area Relic and Historical Association.

May all the dead who died loyal to their notion of duty, and to the country they loved, be remembered every day, holiday or not.

Last Call – Again

The heat of summer is beginning to lose a little of its punch, as August has given way to September, leaves are beginning to turn, and in this long-running drought, to fall a bit earlier than normal. As I do in these weeks every year, I remember my friend the late Billy Phillips, actor, comedian, raconteur. Sometime in the small hours of August 26, in 1983, Billy died in his sleep. The following October 10th would have been his fortieth birthday.

He was four days out of the hospital, after a three-week stay following a cluster of heart attacks which required two rounds with a defibrillator. Billy had arrived at the hospital emergency room a month earlier, feeling the onset of something very wrong, barely had time to tell the admissions clerk that he thought he was having a heart attack, and at that moment collapsed. The emergency staff hustled him into the nearest treatment room and began the intensive care that prolonged Billy’s life for three weeks and four days.

Friends and family gathered, and once Billy was moved to a room, that room became “Club Billy” for the rest of his stay. Billy entertained his callers, in his element, able to forget his looming mortality doing what he did best, telling stories, making jokes, putting on a few of his many characters. He was a performer. He may have suspected that this was the last play, and when this particular performance closed, his personal theatre would go permanently dark.

Since the patient was without family in town, or funds, friends volunteered to house him and watch over him in his convalescence, which officially commenced on a Monday. His father went home to Pennsylvania, and the first watch went on duty. Calder, the husband of the host couple, had been practically a brother to Billy when they were young. Calder’s family had given the young Billy a home, so that he could finish high school in Chattanooga, following his father’s transfer out of town. Billy was home, again.

Friday came, and the second shift of friends were on deck to take Billy in. The night before, his first shift had stayed up late with Billy, who had other old friends visiting that night, telling old stories, remembering good times and laughing much. Billy mentioned that he had a toothache starting, and was pretty tired. The friends wished each other good night, and so to bed.

The next morning, Calder and Betsy, his wife, went to work, careful not to wake the sleeping Billy. Betsy prepared Billy’s lunch, covering the plate and leaving it in the refrigerator, with a note reminding Billy of a follow-up doctor’s appointment that afternoon.

Betsy called to check on Billy at mid-day, and there was no answer. She called again. still no answer. Uneasy, she called her son who worked close to the house, and could get there quickly. A short wait which seemed long to her, and her son called back to say that Billy was in bed, blue and cold. Sometime after taking his toothache to bed, Billy had died.

Twenty-five years ago, and I remember hearing of his death as clearly as if it were yesterday. The news rippled out through the extended network of Billy’s friends, and funeral plans were made and carried out. A memorial service in Chattanooga at the funeral home, and burial the next day in Augusta, Georgia, the home of Billy’s mother’s family, where the family plot in an old cemetery had room for another member.

This upcoming October 10th, Billy would have turned 65. He would have had witty things to say, jokes at his own expense mostly, and mordantly funny references to mortality. But on that August early morning long ago, his own last call stopped age and decay and all the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Billy usually finished his many evenings on the town at David’s, a bar now defunct, a few blocks away from his apartment. As the bartender called “last call” Billy would down his final beer, and with a lopsided, confiding sort of smile wend his way into the darkness. I have always thought it was probably around that same time, two-thirty a.m. on August 26th, 1983, that he made his final exit.

Selah.

Letters to the Dead

…The Long Devotion of Emily Miller Smith.

I have written before of the close relationship between my father and his cousin, Miller Smith, who died in France during World War II. Miller was the oldest of three children of George Blackwell Smith and Emily Miller Smith. My Uncle Blackwell and Aunt Emily. The loss of their oldest child, an outstanding man with great promise for a successful life, left both parents devastated. Miller died in October of 1944, and from the day they received the news, Uncle Blackwell and Aunt Emily coped with his loss and treasured his memory.

In aid of remembering Miller in a meaningful way, Aunt Emily began a year or two following the war to write an epistolary essay, addressed to her dead son. These pieces were published in the Chattanooga Times each Memorial Day (always May 30, since Aunt Emily refused to recognize the Monday Holiday Bill.) In these letters Aunt Emily discussed the events of the year since the previous Memorial Day, with special reference to the strength of our country, the challenges of international tensions, and closer to home, the continuing love and pride his parents took in their departed son. Below is an excerpt from her letter on Memorial Day, 1976, the Bicentennial. It gives a little flavor of her pride in country and family, and her resolute optimism:

No Americans can have more important a part in our great Bicentennial celebrations today than the thousands and thousands of our war dead, those who have given their lives in battle that the principles and dreams and struggles of our nation in behalf of freedom might come into being. We have been involved in many—for us—unavoidable conflicts. Even today many Americans in diplomatic service and in our trained and ready armed forces are striving to employ the principles and standards of freedom and self-government with others all over this little world of ours.

This letter was the next to last of Aunt Emily’s letters to Miller. She wrote one more, in 1977, then fell ill later that year and died at home late in January of 1978. I still read an occasional one of these letters, going to the library to scan the microfilm until the blurred and speckled pages roll round to the editorial page and the box enclosing “To My Dear Young Soldier,” the title Aunt Emily gave to her letters. At the end of each letter, she gave this closing:

One does not mail letters to the dead. As usual I am sending this to a newspaper. If it can be of any possible help in the still continuing struggle for world peace, I hope it will be published.

And it always was.

Another Birthday without Its Honoree

William Joseph Phillips, III

October 10, 1943 to August 26, 1983

On August 26, 1983, I, and all the rest of a goodly company, learned that our friend Billy Phillips had died. Inheritor of a genetic predisposition for early heart disease, Billy only fitfully took care of his health. In the words of an old epitaph I once saw in a Massachusetts cemetery, “He ate and drank, and sinned and suffered, and squeezed his orange very dry.” Billy would have been forty the following October 10th. He had extracted the most he could from his short life.

On a Sunday of fierce heat, a packed funeral home chapel heard a eulogy for Billy, celebrating his paradoxical nature, as thunder grumbled and then crashed overhead, followed by torrents of rainfall. Billy did not go gently into that good night. Reluctantly, he loosed his grip on the world, and left much grief behind. For those of us of a like age, the departure of a friend by natural causes was a sobering experience. Mostly, though, we grieved for the departure of a unique friend, compact of wit, sorrow, joy, vigorous appetites and an imperfect sense of his own value to hundreds of friends.

Ah, Billy, you hardly knew yourself.

Now it is twenty-three years since Billy, an accomplished comedic actor and raconteur, trod the boards of his natural theatre, the scattered bars of a thousand happy hours, where he raised a host of characters from his prodigious imagination. He gave, and gave, and gave again, and his admirers were not sated, they laughed and shouted, “More, Billy, more.” Finally, there was no more to give. The candle had guttered out at both ends, and Billy slipped away in his sleep (found by the son of his friends, in whose house he was recuperating from a massive heart attack, the next morning. Blue of face and cold of body.)

As the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem sang back in the sixties, when Billy and his friends were young,

Oh, all the comrades that e’er I had
They’re sorry for my going away
And all the sweethearts that e’er I had
They’d wish me one more day to stay
But since it falls unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not
I’ll gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be with you all.

Tonight Babs and I will lift a parting glass to you, Charming Billy.

Memorial Day, 2006

Today is a government holiday under the Monday holiday bill, giving a long weekend to workers in government and other employment. Tomorrow, May 30, 2006 is the traditional day, originally Decoration Day, when the war dead of this country are memorialized and their sacrifices remembered.

For my generation, our parents’ war loomed very large. Almost every child had some war souvenir brought back by a father or a mother. As we grew to adolescence and then entered college, a very different sort of war became our personal history in the making. Viet Nam, a place much more foreign to us than Europe, or even the South Pacific, where my father had served in his war. I did not go to Viet Nam, or into any branch of the service. The Selective Service took two hard looks at me, two bus trips to the pre-induction center in Knoxville for physical and mental testing, then tossed me back into the pool of rejected inductees. Asthma and overweight, not much glory there.

I knew several people who did go to Viet Nam, including just one who died there. In 1998, quite by chance, I had the chance to remember Samuel Russell Mc Gee III at the place most identified with the dead of Viet Nam. With my beloved, Barbara, I was in Washington, D.C. for a book club gathering. The first morning, quite early, just as rush hour traffic was building up, we took a long walk, out of Foggy Bottom, past the Watergate, past the Kennedy Center, and then into the parks surrounding the Lincoln Memorial. We had no specific plan, just walking.

Following a path onto a slight rise, we suddenly realized we were in front of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial. The Wall. At such an early hour, we were quite alone with the Wall, the long shallow angle of black stone gathering us into itself. There were directory listings in protected cases along the overlook, so I thought of Russ, who was in my graduating high school class, but not particularly close to me. I found his name. He had died in 1967, a Navy corpsman who was ashore for some purpose. Rumor had it that he had stepped on a mine. I jotted down the panel and line numbers and looked up. Barbara was just reaching over to touch my hand; we were no longer alone.

From the west, another couple was walking towards that end of the memorial, the man trim in starched khakis, the woman in a muted dress. Both were about my age. Then we looked eastwards, and a man alone was approaching the eastern angle. On our left, the woman came to a halt, her companion glanced at her and nodded, then turned to continue purposefully along the wall. He stepped unhesitatingly down the path to a particular panel. He did not need to check the number. He turned to face the wall, bent a little at the waist, and placed his hand flat on a particular line. He bowed his head. After a moment, he straightened up, turned and walked back to the woman. She gently took his arm, and they walked away. They had exchanged no words.

The man walking down the east wall repeated almost exactly the motions of the departed man in uniform. An older man, in nondescript civilian clothes, he, like the other man, needed no reference to the panel numbers. Again, a hand was placed on a certain portion of the wall, the older man dropped his head a few degrees, a moment passed, then he let fall his hand, straightened up and left the way he had come.

In the face of this poignant moment of paired remembrance, my own unplanned and off-the-cuff moment at the wall, looking at Russ’s name and date, seemed paltry. Perhaps not. In spite of many complaints about the use of Memorial Day as a moveable day in service of a long weekend, perhaps under the markers in all the military cemeteries, and in the unmarked places of battlefields and the sounding deeps of the ocean, the dead soldiers and sailors have many days of remembrance. Their sacrifice and the memories they left mark our memories each day we call up their vanished faces, their silenced voices.

A morning in September, 1998 will stand out for me as a moveable Memorial Day, when chance brought my way two examples of comrades lost but powerfully remembered.

Fegi and Miller

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death

My father was known from his first lisping attempts of speech as “Fegi,” since that was as close as his baby speech powers could come to his given name, “Felix.” My father was the first and last child my grandparents had. A year after Daddy was born, his first cousin Miller Smith, the first son of my Aunt Mimi and Uncle Blackwell, arrived. The next Smith would arrive nine years later, so Fegi and Miller became the next thing to brothers for the rest of their lives.

Constant visits between the two families (both resident in Chattanooga) kept the relationship close, with the two boys frequently sleeping over at one house or the other. I have a set of studio photographs of the two of them over twenty years, from the time when Daddy and Miller were two and one, respectively, until the last picture, in October of 1943, both in uniform, Navy for Daddy and Army for Miller, just before they both went overseas in WWII.