Category Archives: “Dog Days” Diversions

My Own Mini Vietnam Documentary:The Secret Life of Pizza

I don’t think any of us who saw that image has ever forgotten it: the rail-thin general gripping the snub-nosed pistol, the defiant prisoner’s teeth clenched, his bushy black hair standing up straight and unvanquished even as the bullet smashed into his temple, the blood spray just starting at the camera-frozen instant of death.

I didn’t really want to go to Vietnam, but we still envied those hotshot writers and photographers who flew around the world, covering the really big stories, while we were stuck writing up local antiwar rallies and chasing school board scandals.

Pru and I also had babies in common, one apiece, tho hers almost never happened. Pru’s live-in boyfriend Hal was a quiet, sweet guy, who had dropped out of college and was on the way to becoming a carpenter, tho I don’t think he realized it at the time. He just knew he was hopelessly bad at the intellectual pretensions and palaver of most of the rest of us who lived in the shadow of Harvard, which spread from a jumble of plain red brick buildings a mile or so away. That difference of outlook was a source of continuing but low-key tension between him and Pru.

So when Pru turned up pregnant, it was both an accident and a problem. The accident was easy to figure: birth control worked almost all the time. But almost isn’t always. The problem was that even covering local news stories kept us on the go and away from home a lot. And while Pru liked my wife Tish, who was then mostly taking care of our daughter, Pru was determined not to give up journalism to spend several years changing diapers and being captive to a schedule of nursing, naps, and toddler tantrums.

Which meant she decided to have an abortion. In those days, abortion was still outlawed in most of the country, including Massachusetts. But just a year earlier, it had been made legal in New York state. So what was a crime in Cambridge could be done freely in Albany, a three-hour drive to the west.

At her stage, it was supposed to be relatively quick, or so we had been told. A kind of vacuum cleaner would suck Pru’s uterus clean, leaving behind only a small jar of bloody mush.

Of course, Pru agonized about it. She talked to me, she talked to Tish, she talked to her other friends. I was not a fan of abortion, then or now, but agreed that in the end it was up to her.

One morning she and Hal climbed into their old Volkswagen Beetle and got on the Massachussetts Turnpike, Albany-bound. We figured they’d be back in a day or two.

Dog Days Tales: His Eye Is On the Sparrow

One sunny morning in mid-June I was on a train chugging alongside the Hudson River from Manhattan. A few hours later, in my brand new Camp Frontier tee shirt, I inspected the rifle range. It was small, only six target stands, and backed up against the slope of a wooded hill, with nothing behind it for many acres. It looked good: safe, cozy, familiar. This I could handle.

I asked Herbie if I could try out the range. He wasn’t too keen on the idea, but let me take a few potshots. I put two bullets through the bull’s eye, several more close to it, and was getting ready for my last shots when I noticed a fluttering in the trees halfway up the hill.
Lifting my eye from the rifle sight I saw birds flitting through the branches, seemingly unconcerned about the slugs kicking up dirt a few feet below them.

Come on, tweeties, I whispered urgently to them. Come on down here. Let me find out if I’m really still a sharpshooter. Come to papa. But they didn’t.

Everything went well that summer until the morning the killer appeared. Several times a week I met groups of campers at the range, showed them what to do, explained the importance of following instructions, gave out ammunition, and barked the commands:

Grace In Your Face: Remembering Bill Kreidler

My first memory of Bill Kreidler is from St. Lawrence University, at the FGC Gathering of 1984. I was leading a workshop, my first for FGC, on the Basics of Bible Study, and he was in it.

Well, partway in it anyhow. As I recall, he spent most of those weekday mornings perched on the sill of an open window, there on the second or third floor of our old classroom building. I didn’t think he was going to jump out; it was brutally hot, the building was not air-conditioned, and he was trying to breathe.

But at the same time, he did seem to be keeping a safe distance, a space between him and the dangerous book I was waving around, and maybe the bearded breeder who was waving it as well.

During the workshop we spent a lot of time reading aloud the story of David, Jonathan, Saul, and Jonathan’s crippled son, Mephibosheth, as I had culled it from the First and Second books of Samuel. This is a gripping, mournful story, which I called “The Bible as Soap Opera,” and perhaps it went on too long, especially given the weather.

But all through it, there is a clear image of Bill, still on the windowsill, head cocked to one side, paying close attention as we plowed through this saga of love, betrayal, death, and loyalty beyond death. Glancing over at Bill from time to time, I wondered if something about it was sinking in. I now think that it was.

Dog Days Stories: Who Needs A Machine Gun?

It was on one of these trips, in one of those big new stores, on a warm spring day in 1954, that I found the most exciting toy gun in the world.

I had lots of toy guns, usually squirt guns or cap pistols. The cap pistols were almost all long-barreled six shooters, like the ones Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger used in the movies or one TV. The caps for them came in little thin rolls of reddish papers, with a row of dark bumps down the middle. The bumps were the gunpowder, or whatever it was that went BANG when I put them in a cap gun and pulled the trigger.

Caps were always fun, even if my favorite toy gun was broken. I could unroll them on the ground, and take a rock and pound on the dark gunpowder bumps with it. If we hit them just right they’d go POW and make a flash and a little puff of smoke. Sometimes we would find a big rock and smash a whole rolled up roll with it, to see if all the caps would explode at once; but usually they didn’t.

The only trouble with caps was that they got used up fast and didn’t last long. So whenever I found myself in the toy department of a store with a little money, which wasn’t often, I would buy some.

I didn’t have any money at all the day I saw that new gun, and there was only sixty-five cents in my piggybank at home, so I could only look at it longingly.

This was not some glossy cowboy weapon, made to look like it was invented a hundred years ago. No, this was a submachine gun, a weapon of modern warfare, a soldier’s gun. It had a dark blue metal barrel and a wooden stock and a key on one side which I could wind up so when I pulled the trigger it would go rat-tat-tat-tat and shoot a few dozen times like a real machine gun. And I could put caps in it too, so the noise would be really loud.