Transformation: 1962-1964

My father retired from the U.S. Army six months before my college graduation, and bought a house in Enid, Oklahoma. His mother Sara Ann had passed away while he was in Germany, and he and Louise decided to care for his elderly father and try to revive his Dad’s tottering hardware business. If all went as my father dreamed, Rude & Co. would stay in business for another generation. With his Army retirement pay my father didn’t need the money from running a business; he seemed to be searching for some self-respect that had evaporated while he was in the Army.

Louise and my father came to Spokane for my commencement, then drove me back to Enid with them in their Mercedes. (I sold my Henry-J for $50 to another unsuspecting Whitworth student.)

My Peace Corps training was about to begin at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. I had no idea what to expect, but started training like an athlete, immersing myself in books about the Horn of Africa, and circling the Enid High School track in newly purchased track shoes.

After several weeks in Enid, my father sent me off on the bus to the Oklahoma City air-port with a well-intentioned racist comment—“Don’t come back with any polka-dot children.” I include this comment not to denigrate my father, but to illustrate how widespread and natural such racism seemed to be in the 1960s. Bus boycotts and sit-ins were just beginning in 1962. The civil rights revolution had not yet kicked into high gear.

I arrived in Georgetown in the depth of the Capitol city’s muggy dampness. Milling around me were hundreds of confused, tired Peace Corps recruits, men and women of all races. The atmosphere was a mixture of Army boot camp and elite graduate school.

It soon became clear to everyone that the “Peace Corps” was still little more than a vague political dream. The actual organization was being improvised at Georgetown and other campuses around Washington. Our project’s 375 trainees would awaken at 6:00 AM and assemble in the dark on the soccer field. European coaches put us through calisthenics, after which we would run around the track. Classes in linguistics, African history and culture, and two sessions daily in the Amharic language followed breakfast.

We had lots of free time, because the schedule was still being formed. On the spur of the moment it seemed, we would be ushered into large auditoriums to hear lectures by Marga-ret Mead, Chester Bowles, or some other relic of the New Deal era. We would hustle off on hikes in the Blue Ridge mountains or along the C. & O. canal, accompanied by aspiring politicians like Jay Rockefeller (now a Democratic Senator from West Virginia.)

Many conversations were overtly political and reeked with the hubris of the Ivy League graduates in our midst, both trainees and staff. Our project’s leader, Harris Wofford, had been a close Kennedy advisor in the election campaign. He had arranged the letter from Kennedy to Dr. Martin Luther King while he was in Birmingham’s jail, an act which some historians claim won Kennedy the African-American vote, and hence the election. Wofford’s role in Ethiopia was to be plenipotentiary to all of Africa, using Addis Ababa as a base for fostering people-to-people diplomacy. An idealist of the first order, Harris both captured and molded the vision of what the Peace Corps was meant to be.

Information about Ethiopia was almost too exotic to absorb during training. The only useful discussions took place with our Amharic language trainers, Ethiopian graduate students gathered from around the U.S. They were relatively free to discuss politics and culture, expressing opinions that might have landed them in jail under Emperor Haile Selassie’s dictatorship. A coup by one of the Emperor’s sons had recently been quashed. We nervously probed the language trainers for details that might suggest there would be danger for Americans.

One of the trainers was from Eritrea, federated with Ethiopia, yet (because it was a for-mer Italian colony) also a protectorate under a U.N. agreement brokered in 1951. The Eritreans seemed more sophisticated and honest than the other Ethiopians. He also described Eritrea as a more friendly, enlightened place than Ethiopia proper. His affectionate tales about his homeland reminded me of Babar, a children’s story about an orphaned elephant who becomes king of the forest. Knowing that as soon as we arrived in country we would be bidding on assignments, I set my sights on Eritrea.

After seven weeks of training we were taken as a group to the White House, where we milled on the lawn and shook hands with our tanned, smiling President. A few days later, after an exhausting jet flight over 10,000 miles, we stood in a formal line to shake hands with the King of Kings, the Lion of Judah himself. I was in a dream-like state, a character in my own fairy tale. Reality was lurking just around the corner.

As we adjusted to the poverty and rainy summer weather in Addis Ababa, I scanned my new group of Peace Corps friends to find a potential partner. Most of the Italian-Americans were being assigned to Eritrea on the assumption they could easily relate to the Italians still living there. I also met a St. Olaf’s College graduate, Jerry Springston, who was determined to bag the most stereotypical Peace Corps assignment available—preferably a remote village in a harsh environment. Wanting to rise to his courageous (if foolhardy) challenge, I volunteered to go with Jerry to Tessenei, a small village in Eritrea near the Sudan border.

Before Jerry and I took the daylong bus ride to Tessenei, we spent two weeks in Asmara, Eritrea’s Italian-built capital. The compact city of 300,00 people was a refreshing contrast to grimy Addis Ababa. Asmara had lovely villas, palm-lined avenues, and bright bougainvillea vines spilling like laughter over sun-washed walls. There was a palpable sense of pride and autonomy in the Eritrean people, reflected in the country’s blue flag, which bore the olive leaf of the United Nations. The police, dressed in crisp uniforms and Aussie-style cocked hats, seemed more helpful than oppressive. A multi-racial city, permanent home to 30,000 Italians who had chosen to stay after 20 years of British and Ethiopian administration, Asmara in the summer of 1962 had all the markings of a successful transition from colony to self-sufficient democracy.

During the bus trip to Eritrea’s western border, at a stop in the desert town of Agordat, I had my first encounter with Africa. Trying to find shade from the intense heat, I wandered into a market place crowded with camels. Astride one of these ungainly beasts sat a princely specimen of the Beni-Amir tribe—a muscular man with bushy hair, three slashes on each cheek, and a four-foot sword dangling from his saddle, next to a curved knife. The camel shuffled and brayed at this strange white foreigner gaping at the scene, but the desert trader fixed me with a stare that sent a shiver down my spine. In that instant I knew I would never again be the same person I had been before enlisting in the Peace Corps.

The 375 volunteers in Ethiopia and Eritrea were the first qualified teachers ever to be as-signed to high schools and middle schools throughout the Empire. Our mission was to “jump-start” Ethiopia’s education system, to bring it into the 20th century. (This oft-repeated phrase became something of an in-joke, since virtually everything in Ethiopia was still struggling to move beyond Biblical-era standards. A jump from the 1st to the 10th century would seem like an accomplishment.)

Tessenei’s middle school, established a decade before our arrival, symbolized the challenges that plagued all small-town schools. Teachers had given lessons and faithfully produced annual graduating classes over the years, yet not a single graduate had ever passed the national entrance examination for admission to high school. With typical American optimism, Jerry and I viewed the situation as an opportunity. If we succeeded in helping only one student to pass the exam, the measurable improvement would be infinite.

With complete unconcern about our lack of teacher training, or the fact that we could barely communicate with our principal or fellow teachers (even though the curriculum was nominally taught in English) Jerry and I plunged in. All the students had moldy copies of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, an English comedy of manners writ-ten in 1762. It was so wildly inappropriate as a tool for teaching English that we instantly threw the mandatory curriculum out the window and asked students instead to mimic our ESL pattern drills. Desks were crowded with students (even a few girls), but there were no blackboards—so we purchased Masonite panels and black paint, ordered chalk from Asmara, and—voila!—we had classrooms.

To be honest, we were having a ripping good time, despite days frequently hotter than 120 degrees. We made friends with Tessenei’s most powerful sheikh, as well as the Italian concessionaires who ran the local cotton farms. I picked up passable Italian just by playing billiardi with the farmers. Jerry and I sat in the market every evening, throwing down cards in the local version of gin rummy. I swore in Italian every time I lost a trick, but Jerry was too good a Christian to swear, and a weak linguist to boot. Nevertheless, it took only a few months for us to feel like we were entering into the village fabric.

One evening in November, 1962 all the shop stalls in town were unexpectedly shuttered, and Ethiopian soldiers at Tessenei’s street corners mounted machine guns. After a few days of rumors, Harris Wofford drove into town with a retinue of powerful Ethiopians. In the privacy of our rented house he gave us a full explanation of what had happened. The Emperor had long been disenchanted with the U.N. mandate, and managed to coerce enough members of the Eritrean assembly to vote for an end the federation. In what turned out to be a bloodless coup, Haile Selassie declared Eritrea as just another province of Ethiopia, sending troops to every village, adding exclamation points to his illegal seizure of the former Italian colony.

Although Wofford refused to concede the real reason (even years later during my conversations with him) all Eritreans and most Italians knew that the U.S. State Department acquiesced in the Emperor’s seizure of Eritrea because the U.S. National Security Agency leased a large, ostensibly secret listening station in Asmara. There was nothing “secret” about the American soldiers who roamed the bars and streets searching for beautiful, willing prostitutes. These antics, which seemed disgusting at the time, were hilariously described in I Never Did It For You, a history of Eritrea by B.B.C. correspondent Michele Wrong.

The serious side of American espionage was hard to miss, especially in light of the NSA’s domestic eavesdropping in the U.S. The National Security Agency’s powerful antennae, perched on peaks in Asmara’s highlands, could scoop up every radio signal transmitted by Russians, Arabs and even Israelis in the Middle East. Before the age of satellites, Americans needed Haile Selassie’s friendship far more than he needed theirs.

Life in Tessenei changed for the worse, but at first these changes were barely perceptible. Friendly leaders disappeared from town, either because they had been imprisoned or had gone underground to fight with Eritrea’s fledgling rebel movement, the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). Our school’s principal became more insecure and autocratic. There was rising tension between Muslim students and teachers (the majority) and the handful of highlander Christians who were mostly children of police officers. ELF activity escalated, with roadblocks, frightening searches for fugitives on buses and a hand-grenade attack in Agordat. Babar’s African paradise had started to turn ugly.

I continued to improve my spoken Italian, and learned to read the language by studying my only available bilingual text: a Bible printed in both Italian and English. A young Muslim shopkeeper tutored me with spoken Italian and read my Bible to study English.

After several months of casual exposure to Christian scripture the unstable boy went to see British missionaries and told them he wanted to convert to Christianity—a dangerous transformation in a conservative Muslim community. Not long after his conversion he was murdered while preaching in another town. Far from admiring his martyrdom, I was depressed by the possibility that I might be indirectly responsible for a mentally unstable person’s death.

Tessenei had its faults, but like most desert border posts, the town had gathered a colorful cast of rogues, saints and wild men. The town was orthodox Muslim in a way that I grew to admire. You could count on people’s promises, and you had to lock your doors. Five times a day, the muezzin’s call and my students’ prayer mats told me all I needed to know about the discipline and integrity of Islam. The presence of the British missionaries from the Sudan Interior Mission seemed totally superfluous, if not sinister. They were systematically attempting to dismantle a culture that, given the history of Sudan and other British colonies, seemed to me to be in no need of replacement or repair.

On one blazing hot Tessenei afternoon I needed the British doctor to attend my body, if not my soul (which he assumed was already bound for heaven’s reward.) I had been losing weight after vomiting most of my food intake each day. I thought I might have a tapeworm in my gut, like the one Jerry had acquired. (His “intimate little pet,” he called it.) But the pain grew too sharp and localized for me to ignore. The doctor’s probing fingers revealed that my appendix was about to burst. Surgery could be attempted in the missionary clinic, but he advised Jerry to drive me to the U.S. military hospital in Asmara, 200 miles distant over bumpy desert tracks.
Thanks to morphine, good luck and Jerry’s frantic driving, I arrived at the hospital before my appendix ruptured. The Army surgeon treated the surgery as a routine matter, but seemed perplexed by my willingness to “live among the natives” in such a remote place. After a week in hospital and another week of recovery, with Asmara Peace Corps volunteers serving me dinners to put weight back on my skeletal frame, I felt ready to return to Tessenei.

Soon afterward, I received two letters from my father with sad news. The first informed me that our house at Pine Ridge—my only true home—had burned to the ground as a result of a leak in the antiquated chimney. The next letter from my father told me that his father had died peacefully, after a brief illness, from prostate cancer. These letters, along with growing tension with Jerry and the insufferable heat, cast me into a depression.

We ended the school year with the success we hoped for: a single Kunama graduate (Ali Abdu) had passed the national exam. In the end, however, Tessenei got the better of me. A Peace Corps doctor conducted a physical and psychological review, and recommended that I be transferred to another village. I moved for the summer to Asmara which, because it was perched on a 7,000-foot plateau, meant that I would be free from the scorching desert heat.
My growing ability to speak Italian allowed me to move about with ease in Asmara, but an Eritrean teacher commented: “You are starting to sound more like a colonist than an American who came here to help us.”

“What should I do?” I responded. The highland language, Tigrinya, was spoken only in Eritrea and parts of Ethiopia. It would be useless anywhere else in the world. He recommended that I learn Arabic, which I had encountered in Tessenei, but I considered too difficult to learn. The teacher persuaded me that if I faced up to the challenge, I would find Arabic useful for the rest of my life.

Several volunteers from Eritrea’s lowlands were given permission by Peace Corps staff to request an Arabic teacher (a "spook") from the NSA listening base in Asmara. After a difficult six-week introduction to Arabic, taught by a young American Monterey Language School graduate, several of us decided to travel the Middle East to practice our newfound language skills. Our one-month tour through the Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and finally Cyprus sharpened my Arabic somewhat, but I was mostly awe-struck by the impressive cultural heritage of the region. My brief visit to Jerusalem, which then was under Jordanian control, convinced me that the Holy Land was so encrusted by overlapping and conflicting myths (including my Christian religious traditions) that it would never be a safe city until it was placed under international control.

When I returned to Eritrea I learned that I would be re-assigned for my second year to Adi Ugri, a highland village with few Muslims and virtually no one (beside me) who could speak Arabic. Five volunteers were assigned to Adi Ugri. Three (including me) were from the first wave of Peace Corps assigned to Ethiopia, and two others, both women, had just arrived from the U.S.

Our assignment was to teach in a new high school (9th grade) in what was already a distinguished middle school named after St. George, the patron saint of Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia. Italians had opened the school during the Mussolini era, restricting education for Eritreans to the fourth grade. Despite this, some of Eritrea’s most assertive leaders were St. George graduates, proving that even a minimally educated population can destabilize an autocratic regime.

My partner Nyle and I helped our headmaster Iyob, who himself had only a fourth grade education, in devising a complex schedule for 200 ninth-graders. Thinking it would be an easy task, Nyle and I were forced to stay up late into the night working out the mathematics to equalize class sizes and schedules. Next morning, as we laid the schedule out in front of Iyob, he responded: “I thought of this solution myself this very morning.” We knew that he was merely taking undeserved credit for our work, yet self-serving complaints from us would be graceless, so we remained silent. Forever afterward as I watched others steal or take credit for my intellectual efforts, I would quietly thank Iyob for teaching me the value of remaining silent.

As months passed, and I heard “useless” Tigrinya being spoken around me, I started to pick up the language, despite its restricted usefulness. Formal study of Arabic helped me, because both are Semitic languages with similar grammar and sounds. My most relentless Tigrinya teacher proved to be Letey, an aging former prostitute whom we had hired as our cook and servant. She was shocked each day to see the messy condition of my room, and shouted at me in Tigrinya, her only language, until I began to understand her meaning and started to shout back—in Tigrinya. The mutual affection and anger of these exchanges opened a door to Eritrea’s highland culture for me that has never closed. I also learned Tigrinya in the best way to learn a language: by engaging your heart and adding new words and idioms out of necessity.

Midway through my year in Adi Ugri one of the strangest, most humiliating events of my entire life occurred. I’ve re-told this story so many times that it has taken on the character of a legend -- yet, like all good myths, it reveals new, unsuspected layers of truth every time I tell it.

Our students, most of whom were bright, and determined to follow our lead into the modern world, nevertheless clung tenaciously to some local superstitions. One day they revealed to Nyle (who was teaching science) their excitement about the imminent visit of Yifter, an Ethiopian illusionist who claimed that he had eaten a truck. Tickets to Yifter’s show were beyond our students’ means, but they begged us to go see for ourselves the wonders of this magician.

Nyle was as concerned as I was about our students’ wide-eyed naiveté, but he treated the matter as a joke, offering to take a frying pan to the show to test Yifter’s ability to improvise as an iron-eater.

At some deeper level, the magician’s challenge to modern knowledge angered me. I knew that our students were all too susceptible to the claims of authority figures, and the Emperor himself had requested a command performance from Yifter, thus adding to the magician's credibility. I wanted my students to think for themselves, to treat any claim, from any source, with critical thought and healthy skepticism.

When the day for our show in Adi Ugri arrived, Nyle and I sat in the front seats of the theater next to headmaster Iyob, watching the magician proceeded to swallow bits of glass and metal, some quite obviously quite sharp. At one point, to verify Yifter’s capacity to eat metal, his assistant passed around a plate of quarter-inch long nails that the magician was about to swallow.

When the plate was passed to me, a strange rebellious impulse welled up inside me. How could we let Yifter get away with this deception? Perhaps the nails were digestible fakes. They were, after all, only small bits of metal—not an entire truck. Why, I muttered to myself, anyone could swallow nails, including me.

Distractedly, I popped a handful of nails into my mouth and swallowed them. Flustered, Nyle asked me if I had done what he just saw me do. “Yes,” I replied, “but I’m not sure why I did it.” Other spectators shifted their attention from Yifter to me. An uncomfortable awareness slowly dawned on me: I was now in Yifter’s camp, an enemy of science, a friend of magic.

The iron-eating man’s show no longer mattered to me. I had to find a way to get the nails out of my stomach. I walked back to our house, missing Nyle’s triumphant exit from the theater with an uneaten frying pan. I was furiously at work in my bedroom, trying to find a way to vomit.

When Nyle returned I had managed to fill a small bucket, but was unable to see or feel hard objects at the bottom. Concerned about the nails perforating the lining of my stomach, Nyle suggested that we visit our local doctor (who happened to be Spanish) and request an immediate examination.

I remember a vein throbbing in the young doctor’s temple as I explained the evening in my halting Italian. He was close to exploding with laughter at the foolish American standing before him, awaiting examination. Nyle and I watched with fascination as he probed my stomach, looking for the nails through an ancient X-ray fluoroscope. “Quindici” (fifteen) was his final verdict. They were small. The danger would pass (along with the nails) in 48 hours. Or possibly, it might not – the nails could perforate. He told me to come back if there was conspicuous bleeding in my stools.

As he drove me back to our house in his Land Rover, the Spaniard lectured me on proper colonial attitudes. “If the natives tell you up is down, just answer: Va bene! (OK in Ital-ian). If they say black is red, say Va bene! And if they say they can eat nails, for God’s sake use the same answer: Va bene!”

At various Peace Corps reunions my friends have asked me to repeat the “Nail Story,” and I have obliged, playing the role of the fool once again without hesitation. Yet I cannot dismiss my actions as the excesses of a young Peace Corps volunteer who had “gone native.” The French have their own name for the weird behavior of Europeans on the Dark Continent—the mal d’Afrique (African sickness). But on that dark night in Adi Ugri I know that I swallowed something more profound, more potent and consequential than Yifter’s nails. I still decline to give it a name, but I am certain that the mysterious quality I swallowed that night is still inside me, and it changed my life forever.

A month after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 I wrote an opinion that was published in the Los Angeles Times. It comes as close as anything I have written to describe the transformation available to anyone who struggles to leave his or her cultural cocoon:

Why celebrate the Peace Corps at all? What did it ever do to achieve peace? Why has anti-Americanism flourished even after our nation sent 140,000 of its “best and brightest” to spread goodwill? How many American volunteers served in Afghanistan? What did they ever teach other Americans about this complex Muslim culture? What did the fundamentalist Taliban ever teach us, if they hate us so?

I have more than a casual interest in these questions. Just as I graduated from college I heard the stirring words of President Kennedy: “...ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” A few months into this grand experiment I became a Peace Corps volunteer, and it changed my life.

Nearly 40 years later I am neither wise nor cynical about my own service, and I respect the efforts of my Peace Corps colleagues, failed or otherwise.

We have tasted deeply of other cultures. We love America, yet we are now comfortable as citizens of the world. We are people with a mission. This mission is what our nation must now heed in its battle against terrorism.

After I struggled to teach English in Ethiopia without books for two years, some of my students managed to get good scores on their national school-leaving exams. Quite a few became refugees and now live in the U.S. A larger number were killed in the generation-long war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Some survived and became leaders in the newly independent nation of Eritrea.

Here is how you measure success in the Peace Corps: I established a small library with books sent from the U.S. Years after I left Ethiopia a nomad child picked up one of these books, a math text, and discovered that he had a talent with numbers. He is a committed Muslim and grew up among orthodox believers in Sudan. He could have grown up to be a terrorist. Instead he is a math professor in Toronto. He tracked me down on the Internet.

What is this small voice that keeps the Peace Corps mission alive?

It is the stench and buzzing flies of poverty, seared into our consciences.

It is the hope that the lessons we taught and the lessons we learned will tip the balance toward self-sufficiency for proud and resourceful people.

It is the conviction that guns, flooding the world in such quantities that their price is cheaper than bread, will solve nothing for the weak or the strong.

It is our respect for local traditions: the Sharia courts, the village headmen sitting under spreading olive trees, the lilting stories and songs of our new languages—Urdu, Tamil, Swahili, Amharic, Arabic—that make us believe that peace is possible.

The “other” is no longer strange, weird or threatening.

There comes a point in every war when people on all sides grow weary of killing. They accept the undeniable fact that their common humanity is more fundamental than what separates them. This defining moment is called peace.

Every Peace Corps volunteer has witnessed the alchemy of the exotic becoming familiar. This experience—and the belief that it can happen again and again, even among those who are most hostile to our nation—is what eventually will make America secure.

Man Emerging: 1958-1962

Whitworth College was (and remains) an idyllic Presbyterian campus, with a curriculum that ensures escape from the world, even as it challenges students to identify the gifts they have to offer to the world. As a hyper-Christian liberal arts college, it was one of many academic enclaves that forbade drinking, smoking or dancing (the Devil’s trinity) and coerced students to attend twice-weekly Chapel on pain of expulsion.

Given my Young Life and church preparation, it’s not surprising that I thrived in this environment. What is more surprising, perhaps, is the high quality of discourse and inquiry in the classrooms I faithfully occupied — more eagerly, perhaps than most students. I sat in the front rows, made eye contact with lecturers, and raised my hand with questions so frequently that I came to understand that my curiosity could be annoying, even to professors. I acquired a passion for writing, and was soon rewarded with a string of As. Instead of the predicted C average in college, I soon made the Dean’s list (B+).

The campus’s intimate size and residential life gave most students a sense of identity which would have been virtually impossible at a public university. Friendships were intense, and several extended far beyond my college years. Professors were treated with reverence, and sometimes deserved to be held in awe. Any Whitworth student of this era will remember names like Dilworth, Simpson, Yates and Duvall with a sense of affection and deep respect. These were men who had honed their minds and lives into passionate teaching instruments. We submitted ourselves to their probing scalpels, knowing that love of inquiry was at the heart of the enterprise, and like good surgeons, they would do us no harm. Ever since Whitworth, these professors have remained my models for intellectual and moral integrity.

During the winter break, Sally and I traveled by train from Oakland, California (where she had started a teaching career) to Enid, Oklahoma, where we visited our Rude grandparents and cousins. It was sadly obvious that the senior Walter and Sara Ann were growing too old to remain active, yet my grandfather went to the hardware store every day nevertheless, aided by hired help. My grandmother seemed somewhat strict and cold to me during this visit. It could have been her age, or perhaps an arbitrary judgmental streak that was there all along. I recognized her behavior all too well, because she reminded me of my father.

At the end of my freshman year my father wrote to suggest that I come to Germany for the summer, and possibly explore continuing college overseas. I knew this could be my last opportunity to travel and live as an Army dependent, so I acquiesced, knowing that such a trip would never be possible with my own limited funds.

I crossed the Atlantic by propeller plane with a fuel stop in Greenland — passenger jets had not yet filled the skies in the summer of 1959. I arrived in Stuttgart tired after a day-long drive from the airport on the autobahn. After we arrived at my father’s house on the U.S, Army base, I insisted on taking a tram into town. I wandered aimlessly on German streets, feeling depressed and panicky because I couldn’t communicate with anyone. My childhood cultural fluidity brought me to a quick decision: I enrolled in a beginning German course as soon as I could find one.

The school happened to be in Salzburg, Austria in the very locale where Sound of Music was filmed a decade later. The summer was warm, and I fell into a brief, risky romance with the daughter of the school’s tyrannical Direktor. The school’s “immersion” study (amplified by my romance with Etta) somehow allowed me to acquire facility with the language in only one month.

I was self-conscious about Europeans’ near-universal dislike of American tourists. On one occasion I tried to pretend I was a Norwegian student with halting skill in speaking German. My German interlocutor spoke Norwegian, so I was exposed as a not-too-clever imposter. I spent several days in Vienna at the 1959 Communist Youth Festival, just to get a personal impression of the “Red Menace.” I was unimpressed by the rallies and propaganda, but when I returned to Stuttgart I learned that my visit in Vienna had alarmed my father’s superior officers. My father told me never to visit such places again. I felt that I was much too old to be tethered to a tree all over again.

Although my disguise as a Norwegian was blown, the incident got me to thinking about traveling north to the place where the Viking Rudes possibly came from. With a little research, I located a YMCA-sponsored international work camp in Alesund, Norway. After my arrival to this tiny village near the Arctic circle, I was enchanted by the small stave churches and sparkling fjords, which brought to mind the more remote parts of Puget Sound, near Seattle. Soon the mood turned to hard work — digging a long irrigation ditch in rocky soil by hand, to a depth of four feet.

For three weeks I labored in wet boots, shielded from the elements by a muddy, rain-soaked cape. My muscles began to bulge, but near then end of my Norwegian sojourn I caught a cold, which turned quickly into bronchitis. I boarded a train bound for Denmark and Germany, then passed out. By the time I tumbled off the train at Stuttgart, barely able to lift my head from the pillow, I began to suspect I was seriously ill.

My diagnosis was confirmed at the U.S. Army hospital in Stuttgart. I had a bad case of pneumonia, treated by bed-rest in the hospital for three weeks. After my vitality returned I began a reading binge on a randomly-chosen but prescient topic: Southeast Asia. I remember especially two books about Vietnam by Bernard Fall, a French war correspondent. When I was released from the hospital, I knew enough about the region to advise anyone willing to listen never to send U.S. troops there. No one was listening. A year later, after the CIA-led fiasco in Cuba, President John F. Kennedy sent the first Green Berets to Vietnam.

My nascent skill in the German language would have been wasted had I chosen to return to the U.S., so I decided to stay in Munich for at least one college term. By attending a branch of the University of Maryland in this relaxed Bavarian city I was able to continue receiving U.S. academic credits. I was blessed with a good German teacher, a challenging philosophy instructor (a French existentialist) and a small coterie of German and American friends.

Nevertheless, after making good progress in German (and fulfilling my dream of skiing in the Alps), I grew homesick for my Whitworth friends, and the simple pleasures of the small Spokane campus. After spending a tense Christmas in Stuttgart with my father and Louise, I boarded a ship crammed with Army dependents and crossed the stormy Atlantic toward — dare I call it home? Why not? I had no other place....

My linguistic talent and mid-year arrival solidified my image as an exotic world traveler at Whitworth. More significantly, my interest in medieval and Renaissance history was deeply enriched by my nine-month European sojourn. I declared myself as a history major, and made vague internal decisions about a career in either the law or ministry.

I was given several opportunities to volunteer while still an undergraduate. One of these was as a temporary minister for a vacant pulpit in a remote farming community. Each Saturday I would carefully type a sermon with elegant Christian insights — mostly gleaned from the college’s sermon-rich environment, rather than my own life. Then, early on Sunday mornings I would drive 75 miles over frozen roads, fire up the church’s potbelly stove, and wait for the dozen or so worshippers to arrive. The parishioners were already a tight social unit, bonded by farming, fishing and hunting together. This skinny Whitworth kid with his careful syntax and high-flown Biblical stories must have seemed as exotic (perhaps ridiculous) to them as the rural, poorly educated born-again Christians seemed to the kid. Possibly because of my determination, my preaching was well received. Each week, after the sermonizing had mercifully drawn to a close and the last prayers were uttered, I joined the congregation for deer hunting in the wind-swept hills and thick forests near the Canadian border. These were my fondest memories.

At the end of my sophomore year Sally announced that she would leave teaching to enter the Religious Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (as the Sacred Heart order of nuns is formally called.) I respected her decision, but knew that it deeply disappointed my father, who retained some anti-Catholic sentiments from his Calvinist roots. Either his duties or his aversions prevented him from leaving Germany to witness the marriage-like ceremony, in which my sister was installed as a novice. I was Sally’s only family member at the service, unable to truly participate because I wasn’t familiar with Catholic rituals. Other young women who entered the order from large Catholic families were well supported by numerous relatives. I stood alone with (and in heartfelt support of) my sister.

My junior year brought another unsought break in my attendance at Whitworth College. It started with an argument between my father and me, conducted by letter. He excoriated me for getting Cs in math and taking "easy" science courses. He placed no value on the excellent grades I was receiving in liberal arts courses. My father threatened to withdraw financial support if I didn’t choose more rigorous science courses.

My decision to leave Whitworth and escape my father’s controlling hand was impulsive, yet grounded in emotional and financial reality. Most young men are forced at some point to rebel against their fathers in order to discover their own identity. My moment had arrived somewhat later than most, perhaps, but I knew exactly what I had to do.

I gathered my books and transcripts, piled everything into the green Buick Sally had bequeathed to me when she was cloistered, and headed south to Fresno, California. There, on the strength of my tenuous connection with the Saver family and Shaver Lake, I was granted California residency status and admitted to Fresno State University. Tuition costs were nearly zero in 1961. All I needed was a job to pay for my living expenses.

By good luck (since I had no training) I was admitted to the firefighting unit based on the university campus. Dormitory life was rough — several of the guys drank heavily — but the technical aspects of dispatch, hose lays, driving, pumping and fighting real house fires in drills — all of this fascinated me. We never had a fire on campus during my six-months of service — just a few wastebaskets and prank fires. One successful suicide (a jumper from the water tower) made me think that firemen needed medical training as well as fire suppression skills. Others apparently agreed: today EMT certification is required in most fire departments.

My brief but happy stint as a fireman gives me special appreciation for my son Peter’s role as a supervisor on the ski patrol in Park City, Utah. He’s trained as an EMT, and well understands the discipline, teamwork and courage that save lives in emergencies. To an extent greater than both my father and me, he came to understand, as an outdoorsman and homebuilder, the warrior spirit that binds together men (and these days, women) when they face difficult challenges.

My academic record at Fresno State was strong; I was relieved somehow, to be free from the “hot-house” atmosphere at Whitworth (as well as my father’s hot temper). I took courses on Southeast Asian history, and happened upon a “psychology of religion” class taught by an elderly Jungian professor. While reading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces I understood that my Christian faith, still central to my life, met a universal human need for spiritual security, and the response can take many forms. I was a product of a particular time and culture; therefore, I was a Christian. Others had made similar faith choices — Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus — yet all were pursuing deep truths that were accepted as both human and divine.

It occurred to me that this was the heresy that Christians (and probably most other religions) feared most — the possibility that there are many paths to God. Even so, the whole history of monotheism was strewn with so much bloodshed and suffering that I sensed intuitively that Campbell must be on to something. My “escape” from Whitworth resonated with my familial rebellion and spiritual emancipation. I was now responsible for my own choices in a way I had never been when I was submitting to my Father’s (or my father’s) will.

During the summers of my college years I often returned to Fresno to search for work. Most of the time, my Whitworth buddies accompanied me. We established local contacts through First Presbyterian Church in Fresno, and scored jobs as varied as truck driving, logging, janitorial work and house painting. We rented cheap apartments and drove miles through the San Joaquin Valley’s withering hear and endless rows of crops. While hauling cantaloupes in the fields one summer I learned some Spanish, and came to sympathize deeply with the plight of braceros, as migrant farmworkers were then called.

At the end of the summer of 1961 I faced a decision whether to spend my last year of college at Fresno State or Whitworth College. I would like to say that I made the decision to return to Whitworth on the basis of Christian principle or academic quality, but in reality I had an unresolved relationship with a young woman, and needed to find out whether our love was sustainable after my long absence. I patched up matters with my father, and received from him the tuition support I needed to graduate from Whitworth.

Sharon had become my first long-term girl friend after I returned to Whitworth from Germany. As we spent time apart during my absence in Fresno, I felt that I was falling in love for the first time in my life. Over time, however, my personality flaws were exposed: my hesitant, almost diffident attachment to Sharon, my lack of sentimentality, my intellectual insecurity in the company of a smart woman, my basic self-absorption, reinforced by chauvinistic attitudes in general toward women (echoes of my father’s soliloquies after marrying Louise.)

I was not alone among my male colleagues at Whitworth in erecting attitudinal barriers to intimacy with the opposite sex. It was part of the air we breathed. A group of 10 to 15 male students formed a dinner club, where we held seminars on our “unique” philosophy of “Mental Toughness.” Despite a strong element of self-mockery in all this, several members (all of whom were serious scholars) took our philosophy too seriously. I was among this group. I was disgusted when one of our most ardent advocates of celibacy chose to leave our group because he married his girl friend in a “shotgun” wedding. The Mental Toughness movement disbanded shortly afterward.

My relationship with Sharon collapsed midway through my senior year, although we maintained an uncomfortable friendship through my senior year. I had several intense encounters with women in the final months of college, including a renewed friendship with Millie Sweet, the girl I eventually married. Generally speaking, however, I was a ship without a rudder as I approached my “launch” into the world, armed with nothing more potent than my B.A. degree from Whitworth College.

My career choices had narrowed to a single default path at Whitworth -- the Presbyterian ministry. The only real choice I felt I had was which seminary to attend — Fuller, a conservative seminary in Pasadena oriented toward Young Life; Princeton, a middle-of-the-road seminary that my Uncle Buckley and other esteemed pastors had attended; and San Anselmo, considered the liberal choice for lesser scholars. I sent my application to Princeton, confident of my acceptance, because several of my friends had already received letters.

During a trip to downtown Spokane, on impulse I entered a U.S. Navy recruitment center. The idea of entering Navy Officer’s Candidate School after graduation had several attractions. First, it would fulfill my service obligation, which, in 1962, seemed to include the possibility of combat duty. Ministers-in-training were deferred from the draft while they were in seminary, but something inside me wanted to get my military obligation over with quickly. I was given a test, and told that I could qualify as a Navy pilot. My enlistment in the Navy would signal greater independence from my father, for several reasons. I had been raised to feel alternate repulsion and attraction toward the “other” service, which is still perceived as the most elite branch. The prospect of succeeding as a pilot, knowing of my father’s failure in flight school, further pushed me toward the Navy. Finally, having studied Southeast Asian history, I knew enough about the emerging conflict in Vietnam to realize that combat far above the ground would be preferable to trudging through “hell in a very small place,” as Bernard Fall had referred to the French combat experience in Southeast Asia.

A third possibility emerged in an unexpected way when my friend Paul suddenly left Whitworth to join something called the Peace Corps. He sold his car to me (how fondly I remember my battered Henry-J!) which I spent countless hours trying to repair. I thought about Paul and his adventures in a place called Somalia while I tinkered with his car. These ruminations led to one of my most capricious — yet consequential — decisions. I sent an application to the Peace Corps, which I understood to be newly-elected President John Kennedy’s quintessentially “New Frontier” organization still. I was not aware that the Peace Corps was still in the process of organizing itself.

Two weeks before I fell into formation at the long black line of college commencement I received an acceptance letter from the Peace Corps, posting me to the country of Ethiopia — a large blank space on the map of Africa as far I was concerned. I let my friends and family know that my mind was now settled: I was entering the Peace Corps. In my final Chapel appearance at Whitworth College, one of my favorite professors anointed me as “the newest light to shine in darkest Africa.” He had no idea how ethnocentric, nor how wrong, his generous comment would prove to be.

True Believer: 1954-1958

On a fall weekend during my freshman year of high school, I met and befriended Jesus Christ. The occasion was a ski camp sponsored by Young Life, an evangelical group that skillfully introduces teenagers to the Christian faith. I remember the young preacher issuing a simple invitation to those of us gathered around the fireplace to meet a true friend of his, someone who knew our deepest needs, who would never let us down, who would always be with us in spirit.

As I tried to fall asleep that night, I had a conversation with Jesus, saying: “OK, I definitely need someone like you in my life. Welcome to my screwed up world. Show me how to be happy again, and I’ll do anything you ask. Almost anything.”

I clearly remember the immature, tentative quality of this commitment—yet it was the beginning of a spiritual journey that has waxed and waned, but never completely disappeared from my life. Others might judge this childish conversion to be nothing more than a wishful fantasy. I have judged it so myself, many times. But there is no denying the impact that becoming identified as a committed Christian had on my high school years and beyond.

A few months after the ski camp my father accompanied me to one of Billy Graham’s early crusades in Seattle. The idea of his conversion following on the heels of my own must have made him feel strangely vulnerable, but it created a bond between us that complicated and enriched our relationship. During the same period we enrolled together in a Dale Carnegie course in public speaking. My father’s shyness caused him great anxiety before every speech. I became the “star” of the class, however, discovering a spontaneous wit and fluency that may have been my mother’s gift from beyond the grave.

Through my Christian faith and a touch of “ham.” I began to find my identity. It was none too soon, because the angst of adolescence was breathing down my neck. The stakes were made somewhat higher by the fact that I had been advanced a grade in elementary school, and was therefore a year younger than all my classmates. While hormones raged among my friends, they merely trickled inside me.

Young Life presented me with a none-too-subtle hierarchy that mirrored the popularity contests in my high school. At first I was a nobody, but my regular attendance at Bible study, “clubs” (social evenings where young seminarians gave talks) and a string of camps run by the organization caused me to be gradually noticed and respected. My Christian friends were the cream of Lincoln High School (the working-class school I attended), and significantly, they included other scholars and athletes from much more affluent Roosevelt High School. Young Life became a micro-society where I achieved social status through imitation and identification. In a relatively short period of time, for reasons I could never quite discern, I became one of the leaders in a movement to introduce my contemporaries to my friend Jesus Christ.

I made friends outside this circle, of course—especially classmates who shared walks and rides with me to school. One of my best friends had an alcoholic mother and miserable home life that he escaped by shooting hoops in the alley, either alone, or if I was available, with me. I never developed any skill at basketball (or any other sport involving a ball)—but I learned to become a compassionate listener. Most of my Capitol Hill friends pitied me, and some mocked me, because I was the only kid they knew who didn’t have a mother.

My father and I continued our week-end ski trips, which were much more convenient than skiing from San Francisco— Stevens Pass was only an hour away, and Snoqualmie Summit (with night skiing for true fanatics) was only 45 minutes. My skill improved rapidly, and on a vacation at Sun Valley during my sophomore year, I surged past my father in ability. I also found friends with cars. With an unintentionally callous comment, I suggested to my father that he find people his own age to ski with. He did.

My father and I attended University Presbyterian Church together each Sunday. “U-Pres” had a large congregation with evangelical roots that resonated with both Billy Graham and Young Life. I loved the preaching, the music and even the Sunday School. When I was in 10th grade the church hired a youth minister (who many years later became the church’s pastor), Earl Palmer. His stand-up routines rivaled the best comedy on television, yet he had a serious strategy to make the youth program a magnet for young people throughout this part of the city. Under Earl’s leadership, and the elected high school leader (my best friend Ken) the Wednesday night gatherings swelled to over 300 kids.

By some fluke or miracle I was elected leader of the group after Ken’s term expired. I was only a Junior, still lagging behind my contemporaries hormonally, but I could sense—as everyone else seemed to—that I was thriving at the top of the pyramid. I had more responsibility and freedom than the student body officers at Lincoln High; in fact, many of them turned to me for tips on leadership.

Because I hadn’t developed any athletic ability, I was looking for a way to achieve the same popularity at school that I enjoyed at church. Scholarship didn’t seem to be an option: I was still a mediocre student, and found it difficult to concentrate in class. I was too busy at church to run for elected positions. I finally settled on the cheer-leading squad, which had me jumping in front of hundreds of screaming fans at least once a week. No thanks to our efforts, both the basketball and football teams at Lincoln won state championships, so we didn’t need to egg on the crowds.

At home, Sally and I both became so busy we rarely had time to talk. I remember a discussion at the top of our long stairway when she was a senior in college. She asked me about school and my career choices, if there were any. I don’t remember how I answered her questions, but I remember a “click” in my head during our conversation. Sally was no longer my big sister; we had both become persons in our own right, and we could now talk as equals, as friends. It was a shift that happened so naturally, with such positive life-long consequences, that I didn’t appreciate until many years later what an attitude of generosity and love this was on her part. This doesn’t always happen between siblings.

Sally’s curiosity about my intellectual development, reinforced by her own academic success, finally caused me to become interested in school. I remember only one English teacher—I can’t remember her name—who took me seriously as a student. She introduced me to magazines such as New Yorker, Atlantic and New Republic, where I discovered a world of ideas that I hadn’t realize existed. I read novels by Dos Passos and Stein-beck, and finally started to “get” Shakespeare. My teacher challenged me to read Russian authors, who in her view were the pinnacles of writing achievement. Outside of school assignments I started to devour “Crime and Punishment,”, “Anna Karenina” and “Fathers and Sons.” My readings resonated with my growing understanding of Christian theology, or in some cases propelled me into new, uncomfortable territories.

I became an enthusiastic and critical reader far too late to have any impact my 2.2 Grade Point Average. College options were limited; I finished an early prototype of the Scholastic Aptitude Test at the University of Washington with a score that predicted that my college GPA would be (guess what?) 2.2—equivalent to “C”s in virtually every class.

I wasted little anxiety on my academic prospects, however, because I was consumed with excitement for learning. In a strange metaphor (which I still apply to my life) I equated my spiritual and intellectual development with skiing. There comes a point in every run — in every turn, actually — where the skier must commit to the possibility of a disastrous fall. It is not so much the exercise of will or control as it is letting go and trusting which allows the skier to make graceful curves down steep hills. I was beginning to discover existential moments of trust that gave my life the flow and freedom I had been yearning for.

My home life shrank to invisibility as I became increasingly absorbed in school and church activities. Sally still struggled to put dinner on the table each night, but my father and I resisted with Swanson dinners and early escapes to our TV porch to giggle our way through “Our Show of Shows” with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca.

Midway through high school my father purchased a 16-foot runabout, and I quickly became as expert on water as I was on snow. During one beautiful trip with a girl friend in the middle of Lake Washington, my father’s expensive 40 h.p. Evinrude motor fell off the transom. Except for sponged rides with friends on Lake Washington or Shaver Lake, my favorite sport was brought to an absurd (and abrupt) end.

In retrospect (and in view of later conflicts) my father’s commitment of time and money to my interests seems quite impressive. He was less involved in Sally’s life, but all three of us were spinning in our own orbits. After five years as an unmarried widower, my father was seeing women on a regular basis. He was a handsome man with a prestigious job, no doubt a desirable match for many widows and divorcees.

Once, soon after my mother’s death, I saw my father kissing a woman who had invited our family to her home for dinner. I was devastated and let my father know it. Gradually, however, I grew more interested in helping him emerge from his cloud of depression and get on with his life.

1956, my sophomore year in high school, was a year of courtship and turmoil in my father’s life. He had met and fallen in love with Louise Heinlein, a financially independent, attractive divorcee who was clearly smitten by my Dad. He gingerly introduced her to Sally and me, then seemed to pass through an agonizing period of indecision. I was mildly enthusiastic about Louise, but Sally had serious misgivings, which she kept mostly to herself. Finally he asked Louise to marry him, and a wedding date was set at approximately the same time as Sally’s graduation from Seattle University, causing some resentment on Sally’s part.

They honeymooned at Banff and Lake Louise, making plans afterward to live in an apartment in downtown Seattle. Sally moved out — or rather in stark, unfeeling terms, was exiled —and found an apartment near the University, where she began her M.A. studies in speech therapy. I had one more year of high school to complete, so moved into the downtown apartment with my father and his new bride.

This introduction to mid-life marriage came as a cruel shock for both my father and me. As an executive in the apartment building, and a woman with impeccable taste and self-confidence, Louise was at the opposite end of the dependency spectrum from my mother. I could hear her argue with my father for hours through the thin wall which separated our bedrooms. In our private conversations, my father unloaded misogynistic theories about women that both amused and depressed me. I played “the good stepson” but could not bring myself to bond emotionally with Louise. Sally’s palpable anger about the marriage reinforced my concern that my father had made a bad choice. Knowing his stubborn fidelity to principles, however, I knew that that my father would see the marriage through — which he did for the rest of his life, with courage and honor.

My own relationship with girls at Lincoln and Roosevelt High Schools echoed my father’s somewhat tempestuous relationship with Louise. In my junior and senior years I was still bothered by my hormonal age-lag, but my visibility and popularity seemed to make up some of the difference. I found it much easier to get girls interested in me than to build fires of passion inside myself. Some girls I dated were justifiably turned off by my passivity. I developed unrealistic emotional attachments to the prettiest, most popular and unavailable girls. Although I had not yet read Shaw’s Pygmalion, I was already practicing Professor Higgins’ arrogant method of distancing from authentic feelings. Only at the end of high school, in a brief relationship with a girl who had broken up with my best friend (a rebound romance), did I begin to sense the potential of mutual love.

My father’s five-year “sabbatical” from the Army at the University of Washington had come to end, but he was now too close to 30-year retirement from the Army to forego the benefits that one last assignment might accrue. My graduation from high school coincided with his departure to Germany, where he was assigned to Seventh Army headquarters in Stuttgart. Sally and I remained in Seattle. I briefly lived in Sally’s apartment building while she completed her M.A. thesis. Later, during the summer after I graduated from Lincoln High School, I stayed in the home of a wealthy friend who lived in a large estate on Lake Washington. We water-skied through the summer, preparing to enter Whitworth College in Spokane as roommates. Freedom from high school distractions and obligations ignited a spark of intellectual curiosity in me. I spent the summer of 1958 devouring Russian novels, and exploring existentialism.

Survival Unit: 1953-1954

Christmas arrived a week after my mother’s death. It was (and has since remained) a bleak time of year, with my father’s parents visiting from Oklahoma, doing their best to reassure us that we would recover eventually. It became immediately clear that the Rude side of the family grasped our need for stability and support, while the Craycrofts (my mother’s brother Burr, his wife Jean and our three cousins) seemed embarrassed by my mother’s death, or possibly resentful of the price my mother’s military life had exacted. They lived only a few miles away in San Jose, but we saw them only once in the remaining six months that we lived on Chestnut Street in San Francisco.

The winter of 1952-53 was unusually cold, but my father seized an advantage from this. On Saturday mornings we would both awaken at 4:00 am, put our warm clothing and skis into the Chevrolet sedan, and drive five hours to Dodge Ridge or Squaw Valley near Lake Tahoe. Sally had learned to ski in Japan, and joined us on several weekend trips to Yosemite. But the long Saturday drives to Tahoe followed by joy on the slopes became a special healing ritual for my father and me. We talked very little during the ten hours we spent each week-end in the car together, or while we were sitting on the chair lifts. His strong presence and sporting nature were sufficient for my needs.

As spring approached I formed a bond with another adult male, Lacey, the husband of our housekeeper. He would show up on Sundays with fishing poles and walk me down to the docks at the Marina. From Lacey I learned how to string leaders and attach weights that would lower the bait to just the right depth to catch the perch swimming around the dock. Soon I was addicted, and spent many silent hours with this compassionate man, a rare instance of interracial bonding in those years. In 1965 the smooth voice of Otis Redding singing “Sitting On the Dock in the Bay” arrived as a perfect expression of my gratitude for having Lacey as a friend.
Sally’s memories of the aftermath of our mother’s death differ from mine, not least be-cause she was five years older than me, and viewed the world with a clarity that still amazes me. I asked for her recollections (especially focusing on her decision to become a Catholic). Here is what she wrote:

At the funeral I was so surprised to see that most, if not all of my classmates were there, although it was Christmas vacation. (Of course none of the nuns were there, as they were semi-cloistered and didn’t go out for such things, even their own family’s funerals.) We went up to Broadway [the Sacred Heart school] the next day. Mother Mardel gave you a card with a Hummel angel looking up, and said your mother was now taking very special care of you from heaven. The nuns also gave us a big basket of baked goods, and I have since prepared something similar for grieving families, remembering what a thoughtful gift that had been.

Grandmommy and Granddaddy came from Enid, and many Craycroft relatives as well. They came back to our apartment after the funeral and I remember having everything ready for them—coffee, cookies and small cakes on silver trays, etc. That was the last time we saw most of those Craycroft/Shaver relatives.

We had a sad Christmas, of course, but Grandmommy and Granddaddy did their best to make it a warm, familial one. We went back to school after the holidays to finish up that school year, before moving to Seattle. I didn’t go back to piano or singing lessons, because there was lots to do at home—cooking, cleaning, etc., as well as just family life and study. It was just taken for granted by everyone that we could get along without outside help, and we did.

I knew too that I would not go away for college, but would live at home and continue to do my part in caring for the family. Again, there was no discussion of this; it was just taken for granted. (It was only later that I realized that this was rather unusual—a lot to expect from a sixteen year-old.)

I think we all made a silent pact to take care of each other after that, as we’d probably been doing all along. We had our rough spots, and you may have had more than I did, but I too had my share. I do think we tried to care for each other lovingly. I know none of us wanted to be a “broken family”, although that is what we were. I remember wanting us to eat together every night with a well done, nicely presented meal. Each of us found ways to help do more than just survive this difficult time. And in a limited but meaningful way, I think we succeeded.

Daddy, for instance, treasured going skiing with you. I do remember looking for-ward to having dinner ready for you when you came home. I may have missed occasionally when I had a “big date,” but I think you usually came home to a good dinner on those Saturdays. He also loved going to church with you at St. John’s Presbyterian in San Francisco and First Presbyterian in Seattle.

Life went on as normally as could be expected. I finished my senior year with success. I remember at the ceremonies at the end of the year a nun explained to me that since we were a day school, Broadway did not give the highest award in Sacred Heart schools, the Prize of Excellence, “because we don’t know what you are like after school at home, as we would of girls in a boarding school.” I remember answering, and knowing my meaning would be lost on her, “Yes, you do not know what I am like in my home.” (I appreciated then and still do the distance I was able to put between my school and my home life, and try to respect that in students as well.)

I got the Prize of Good Conduct instead—sounds so old fashioned now!

At home we were busy packing for the move to Seattle which would be toward the end of June. The plan was to send our belongings ahead by moving van and then go on a vacation to Southern California and Pine Ridge before we drove up to Seattle.

On Wednesday of that week I went shopping, and as I was returning home I decided to say goodbye to the nuns before leaving San Francisco—a convenient time to get that little duty out of the way. I asked for Mother Mardel, the one I knew best, but was told she and almost all were in retreat, and I could speak to Reverend Mother, a woman who scared me a bit—a character definitely. I said my goodbye and simply to make conversation, I added something like, “Is there a Sacred Heart convent in Seattle, in case I should ever want to think about becoming a Catholic, or just visit the school?”

Reverend Mother Deming smiled somewhat remotely and said, “Let me call you to-night, dear.” She did, with this surprising message: “Why don’t you just go to Seattle as a Catholic? I can’t find anybody to baptize you tomorrow, but Monsignor Cantwell can do it on Friday at St. Bridget’s. It’s the Feast of the Sacred Heart and a good time for you to become a Catholic. You can make your First Holy Communion in our chapel on Sunday, before your graduation downtown, and then go to Seattle a Catholic.”

I replied that I needed to talk this over with my father and would call her back. Daddy and I were both flabbergasted at what she had suggested, but it did click somewhere deep in me. Daddy reminded me of the Catholic Church’s rather grim social history—Inquisition, et al. I remember saying it had a longer history than most groups, and that it had some pretty great high points as well—Francis of Assisi, for instance. All institutions have checkered histories—especially long-lasting ones. I wasn’t considering becoming a Catholic because of the church’s sterling social history, but because of the value it places on the person and presence of Jesus in the community.

He commented on things that sounded superstitious and wrong to him, such as worshipping Mary and the mysterious, almost primitive meaning of “Sacred Heart.” I said that Catholics don’t worship Mary, although some certainly do pay more attention to her than we ever did (or than I do even now.) And “Sacred Heart” just meant the love of God, something with which we were already quite familiar.

After our talk, Daddy called his brother Buckley, a Presbyterian minister, and they talked quite a while. Then he called me back in and said that he agreed with Buckley: This seemed to be of God, and not just fascination with the nuns or whatever. “You have been raised to seek and do the will of God, as best you can. If you believe that this is the will of God for you, you must do it.”

I can’t imagine what possessed Reverend Mother to call me with that message on the phone. It is completely unlike a member of the Sacred Heart religious community to do such a thing. I didn’t like her very much, so this had nothing to do with “doing what the nuns said.” But someplace in my being it was right anyway, and has continued to be. I can’t explain it more explicitly than that. God can speak to us in very unlikely ways. God is, after all, God.

I asked my best friend’s mother to be my godmother at my First Communion. At the little breakfast afterward, I said that I didn’t think things were supposed to hap-pen this way—no religious instructions or anything! Mother McDevitt let out a hearty Irish laugh and just said, “You’re already more Catholic than most of us. Thank God and don’t worry about it!” And I haven’t.

I went up to the Post Chapel at the Presidio to say goodbye, and told Chaplain Alexander what had happened, since I had taught Protestant Sunday School just the week before! He responded very seriously, with tears in his eyes, and said, “God bless you. You have made a decision for Jesus Christ. May it bring you great joy.” I doubt that a priest would have said that to a Catholic who decided to become a Protestant.

We each have love stories in our lives and this is mine. (As you know, I’ve had human loves too, but this is the deep, defining one, of which the others were expressions or “resting points along the way.”)

I did not want my decision to set me outside our close family circle. You know how very deeply grateful I am for our family. We’re not quite the norm I often see around me, but then, who really is. I like us, and thank God for us.

I hope I was present to you when you needed me to be. I know I tried to be.

Our trip to Southern California and Pine Ridge was another chance for healing—an inner journey we had become all too familiar with. It was painful to spend time in the mountains without my mother, but Pine Ridge had become our only home, the only safe harbor in our turbulent lives. The road trip to Seattle was leisurely; we drank in summer’s natural wonder at a string of parks, from Mt. Lassen to Crater Lake to Mt. Rainier.

By luck or compassion I can’t be sure, but the Army handed the perfect assignment to my father in his grieving condition. He essentially became a civilian, as professor of military science and tactics at the University of Washington, and head of the reserve officer’s training corps. (I learned to confuse friends who asked me what my father did for a living: “Oh, he’s P.M.S. & T. of the R.O.T.C at the U. of W.”) No more army bases, no more transient, temporary friends for Sally and me. My father rented a large Dutch colonial house across the ship canal from the U. District, and at age twelve I started to live among people who understood community and family in ways I had never known.

Seattle was a sparkling jewel in the summer of 1953. We arrived at the start of Seafair, a community outpouring of love for the city’s ubiquitous lakes and bays. The three of us enjoyed aquatic ballets at Green Lake, and joined the crowds along Lake Washington to watch the thrilling hydroplane races, where heroic speedboat drivers on occasion would hit a wave, go airborne, flip over, and emerge from the water with a wave — or some-times, as lifeless bodies. I was smitten by the city’s fun-loving spirit, and couldn’t wait to make new friends at school.
My eighth grade, spent in a dreary brick box named Alexander Hamilton Junior High, unleashed a flood of transitions that led pell-mell into puberty. My classmates thought my San Francisco wardrobe was strange, and ridiculed me until I had acquired fashion-able clothing. I joined the school talent show, only to discover that I had no talent. I was a mediocre student, usually enveloped in a cloud of Walter Mitty-like thoughts, pierced only by questions I couldn’t answer because I wasn’t paying attention. Compared to my friends, I was slow to show any interest in girls. To be honest, girls terrified me. Bullies forced me to demonstrate my courage with pointless fistfights in the lunchroom and playground.

My mother was right: I wasn’t very good at anything. But now, I no longer had her around to “love me to pieces.” Among my friends, I felt myself to be a weed, a strange intruder who found nourishment wherever he could, while they blossomed in neat rows of houses, cultivated by living mothers.

Our survival unit at home functioned reasonably well, despite my father’s persistent gloom. Sally, now a freshman at Seattle University, demonstrated skill and dedication as our cook, social host and emotional anchor. My father had a talent from making insensitive comments, and Sally had reason to doubt whether all her efforts were fully appreciated. On a few occasions her temper flared, and dishes or empty cans would fly across the kitchen, barely missing my father. He would erupt with angry words, but he never hit her, or me, that I can remember.
As the third party in this pressure cooker, I felt a desperate need to calm the waters, to become an effective peacemaker. During these crucial years I may have developed the calm, unruffled persona that has been my trademark ever since. I also learned to use humor to deflect attention and defuse conflict. My droll wit, a distinctive Craycroft trait, became my most valued legacy from my mother.

Themes in My Childhood

Many writers have written about death and its horrific effects — murders, genocide, the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel and Fyodor Dostoyevsky are two of my favorite authors, perhaps because they boldly described the emotional terrain already familiar to me.

Only a few writers, however, have written about the death of their own mothers — possibly because it is a subject so painful to describe. Recently, I was given a book: “Our Mother’s Spirits: Great Writers on the Death of Mothers and the Grief of Men.” Some excerpts from this anthology provided me with a mirror for my feelings — both fifty years ago and today.

I went through a difficult period... of hating her for dying, and realizing that she wasn’t the perfect loving goddess I always remember; but lately the feelings are so incredibly jumbled, and the memories are such a scattered mess, I’ve pretty much sworn off trying to make sense of them. (Nick Davis, screenwriter)

It took me fifty years to realize that I had not grieved for the death of my mother. Had I closed part of my heart? When she died I was thirteen and had not been given the opportunity to grieve for her. I had never allowed myself to do so. I was too busy surviving to take the time to realize what had happened to me, what had helped form my behavior, my fears, and my way of dealing with the world. (Norman Sasowsky – artist and professor)

Since your death thirty years ago your presence is a film covering my experience, darkening it and making the world, the world of my life, seem farther away. Your unreality makes my life unreal. But I can’t— don’t know how — to pop you open, and as I move deeper into middle age, I wonder whether the attention I gave you was worth the effort. But still, I sense, until you are real, I will not be real. Some-times I reflect upon the women I have been involved with and I think: “It is all one woman underneath. At my deepest center, I do not discriminate, do not notice who is there at my side…At my deepest center is one woman I am responding to, tailoring my personality to, entertaining, impressing — my mother. (Timothy Beneke – writer)

I am my mother’s slow-moving footstep as she walks down the hospital corridor. I am the slow and reluctant boy who takes a couple of Mom’s things to the hospital where she will stay for the operation. And goes home and pretends nothing has happened. I am the disbelief of everyone as the news reaches us that Mom has died. I am not the pounds of makeup that hide the painful expression on her cold, still face. Just as I am not her shell that lies in an open casket. But I am her spirit walking somewhere about the room. I am the sorrow of all who watch her casket lowered into the ground. I was my mother. I am her spirit. (Gardiner Harris – newspaper reporter}

In three months I will be eighty years old, thirty years older than you were when you died. Except when I have to tie my shoelaces, I don’t feel eighty years old. I, the sickly child, have out-lasted you all… Instead of being embittered, or stoical, or calm, or resigned, or any of the things that a long life might have made me, I con-fess that I am simply lost, as much in need of comfort, understanding, forgiveness, uncritical love — the things you used to give me — as I ever was at five, ten or fifteen…. (Wallace Stegner, author)

One of the themes that shaped me, therefore, was the early loss of the only person I loved deeply, who (it seemed to me at the time) returned my love unconditionally. No wonder so few people write about this experience: death happens, it leaves its indelible stain, and we have no choice except to move forward as perpetual survivors.

I’ve made friends with a few men who also lost their mothers as children. Like combat veterans, we nod to each other in brotherhood, and then afterward assiduously avoid the major turning point in our lives. It is enough — a welcome gift— to be understood.

Boys who lose their mothers are members of an unacknowledged, invisible tribe. In a similar sense, children who grow up in military families lead lives that are forever shaped, and in significant ways distorted, by the experience. Another anthology found its way to my bookshelf recently: “Uprooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global.” One writer in particular, Pat Conroy, captured the feeling of a child who shapes his identity as he comes of age as an Army brat.

By necessity, I made my own private treaty with rootlessness and spent my whole life trying to fake or invent a sense of place. “Home” is a foreign word in my vocabulary and always will be... I was a military brat conscripted at birth who had a strong and unshakeable sense of mission. The military life marked me as one of its own. I’m accustomed to order, to a chain of command, to a list of rules, a spit-shined guard at the gate, retreat at sunset, reveille at dawn, and everyone in the world must be on time.

Because of the military life, I am a stranger everywhere and a stranger nowhere. I can engage anyone in conversation, become well-liked in a matter of seconds, yet there is a distance I can never recover, a slight shiver of alienation, of not belonging, and an eye on the nearest door. The word “goodbye” will always be a killing thing to me, but so is the word “hello.” I’m pathetic in my attempts to make friends with everyone I meet, from cab-drivers to store clerks. As a child my heart used to sink at every new move or new set of orders. By necessity, I became expert at spotting outsiders. All through my youth, I was grateful for unpopular children. In their unhappiness, I saw my chance for rescue, and I leapt at it.

Yet I can walk away from best friends and rarely think of them again. I can close a door and not look back. There’s something about my soul that is always ready to go, to break camp, to unfold the road map, to leave at night when the house inspec-tion’s done...

I brought so few gifts to the task of being a military brat. Most children learn who they are by testing and measuring themselves against the friends they grow up with. The military brat lacks these young, fixed critics who form opinions about your character over long, unhurried years or who pass judgment on your behavior as your personality waxes and wanes. But I know the raw artfulness of being an outsider.

Each year I began my life all over again. I grew up knowing no one well, least of all myself, and I think it damaged me. I grew up not knowing if I was smart or stupid, handsome or ugly, interesting or insipid. I was too busy reacting to the changing landscapes and climates of my life to get any clear picture of myself. I was always leaving behind what I was just about ready to become. I could never catch up to the boy I might have been If I’d grown up in one place.

In a nutshell, these were the themes of my childhood: cultural fluidity, unrequited love, irreplaceable loss and rootlessness. Yes, some damage was done, but I haven’t listed these themes to evoke sympathy. The salient fact is that I didn’t choose any of these themes, any more than I chose my height or skin color. As a child I might have in some ways felt responsible for Hiroshima or my mother’s death, but my adult self understands that these were simply the cards dealt by fate. My most urgent need at age eleven was to find a path to survival. The next few years were perhaps the most formative of my life, as others lovingly helped me find my path.

City on a Hill: 1949-1952

Picture my joyful family on the foredeck of an Army transport ship, sailing beneath the Golden Gate bridge, singing with tears and heartfelt emotion, “Open up that Golden Gate — California, here we come!”

Picture me standing a few days later, being introduced to my new classmates just outside the Arguello Gate, entrance to the Presidio. My mother was at home, still moving into our quarters at Fort Scott. My new teacher stood with me at the front of the classroom:

Johnny Rude, you’ve traveled a lot in your short life. Please tell the boys and girls a little about where you’ve been.

This was my chance to make an impression. I told my new friends about my birth in Panama, a few exotic tidbits of Japanese culture, and our meandering cruise home, which took us to Okinawa, Guam, Manila and Honolulu.

Picture my mother sitting at home later that day among the boxes, taking a phone call from my teacher.

Mrs. Rude, we are delighted to have Johnny in our school, but I must insist that he stop telling these exaggerated stories about his travels.

My mother defended me as a truth-teller, and repeated the story with delight to her friends. This was a common theme of conversations in military families: we were nomads, misunderstood by civilians because, despite our humble possessions, we considered ourselves rich beyond measure in experiences. In the Madison Elementary class-room, I probably made myself seem as exotic as an actual Japanese exchange student — but this didn’t bother me. My mother, as always, was my staunchest defender.

Our family’s return to San Francisco brought other, weightier decisions with far-reaching consequences. Sally, five years older than me, was about to enter high school. San Francisco’s public schools might have been adequate (they certainly were considered so for me) — but Sally was showing signs of real academic potential. My mother, always at-tuned to social matters, had given some thought to San Francisco’s excellent private high schools — Hamlin, Holy Name, Immaculate Conception, Academy of the Sacred Heart. Because of the city’s rich Italian heritage, San Francisco’s private education was predominately Catholic education. Thus, Sally’s choice of a high school had religious implications for our Protestant family.

In the end (as Sally later explained) an accident brought her to the steps of the Sacred Heart Academy on Broadway. My mother and Sally went there to give a ride to one of Sally’s new friends, a girl who was required to stay after school for some infraction or other. During their long wait they received a warm welcome from a nun and a tour of the elegant Flood family mansion that housed the school. By the time they reached home, my mother was determined to convince my father to let Sally attend the Academy of the Sacred Heart.

Neither of my parents were at this point in their lives dogmatic believers in any faith — both came from families might best be called “cultural” Protestants. To complicate matters, two historical strains of Protestant faith were at war within the two families, a pale reflection of the war that had been waged for centuries. During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, thousands of Anglicans and Calvinists had died gruesome deaths at each other’s hands. Virtually the only thing that English Protestants had in common was the fact that they despised and persecuted Catholics.

Religions tend to become more moderate when placed under the benevolent protection of American democracy, but it might be useful to contrast the world-views of my parents’ two denominations.

The Episcopalian tradition, my mother’s preference, had become he church of the upper class in most American towns, with parishioners enjoying the ornate vestments and sips of sherry at the communion rail. The theology was so stately (served up in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer) that I believe it had mostly ritual significance for my mother. Her personal theology was private but eclectic, drawing on the popular “positive thinking” books of Norman Vincent Peale and the Freudian reflections of her Army psychiatrist, Colonel Albert Glass.

Presbyterians, my father’s faith community, were a more austere, middle-class group. Their services featured long-winded, guilt-inducing sermons with strong emphasis on God’s predestined will, good works and tithing. I think my father’s Calvinist commitment may have been as much financial as it was spiritual. I always sensed that he believed there was a connection between God’s earthly rewards and the size of the checks he placed into the collection plate every Sunday.

Both of these belief systems might have influenced my religious development, (some-what), but the Army had prescribed a fuzzier kind of faith for its dependents. Like the other military services, the Army had created an inclusive Protestant liturgy for anyone in the military who happened to be neither Catholic nor Jewish. This was the watered down, all-purpose military church Sally and I attended.

The Presidio Chapel was a beautiful Mission-style sanctuary perched high on a steep hill beside the base’s vast cemetery. Above the pews, regimental flags commemorated the sacrifices of soldiers who had served in every war in America’s bloody history. In this awe-inspiring setting, Sally and I received our earliest instruction in matters of faith from friendly Army chaplains. Sally played the piano at Sunday school while I wandered the halls trying to find something to distract me from boredom.

My mother’s plea to send Sally to Sacred Heart met with initial resistance from my father, but a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle cinched her case: “S.F. High School Students Using Drugs.” In my father’s mind, drugs were one of the few things worse than Catholicism. I was often puzzled by my father’s extreme fear of addiction: at one point he even discouraged me from music lessons, saying: “The jazz men I played with all smoked reefers.” [To be fair to my father, the Army was in the midst of an epidemic of drug use. According to a Newsweek article (February 16, 1953) soldier addictions tripled within a year after the outbreak of the Korean war.]

One night after a family dinner in Chinatown, my father pinned a yellow rose on my mother’s lapel, with a jocular comment: “It matches your eyes.” I remember the look of alarm on my mother’s face, because her skin had indeed turned sallow, and she had been bruising easily and felt weak. The warning signs were sufficient to send her to the doctor. Soon afterward she was diagnosed with jaundice, caused by infectious hepatitis.

Thus began a series of fainting spells, ambulance calls and hospital visits that made life for all of us, but especially for my mother, a living hell for the next three years.

Hepatitis A is a tenacious virus that has largely disappeared from the U.S. due to better sanitation and hygiene. It is still endemic in many countries, however, and Japan had certainly not achieved the levels of sanitation required to protect us when we lived there. Over 200,000 G.I.s contracted hepatitis during World War II. My mother no doubt acquired it while in the hospital delivering her stillborn daughter, or receiving the butchered surgery on her shoulder.

After years of reflection, it seems to me that the string of tragedies she had endured accelerated the disease’s attack on my mother’s body. First, her father died in 1932, when she was only twenty. Then in 1943, her mother’s unexpected drowning broke her spirit. While still young and vital in 1947, my mother suffered a mother’s deepest loss: the death of her newborn child. Soon afterward, her beauty was blemished by a surgeon’s knife. Behind her for nearly two decades, and ahead of her for an uncertain future she had to face the Army, with its social rituals and unspoken (but ominous) demands on her husband, children and fragile self — body and soul.
My mother’s drinking was not acknowledged as a serious problem (even after she died) by my father and sister. Alcohol was too commonplace, both in the Army and society at large, to be viewed melodramatically as a quiet instrument of suicide.

As she grew weaker, I took to searching for the source of my mother’s bewitchment. What I witnessed from beneath her bed on afternoons after returning from school was reality — her unsteady walk to the bathroom cabinet, where her sherry bottle was hidden, and unsteadily emptied.

I watched as she drank from a new bottle each day, carefully wrapping the empties in shopping bags so she could spirit them out of the house. Later each evening I witnessed the results of her binges — her violent mood swings at the dinner table, throwing food at my father; her arguments with our housekeeper, her dashes to the bathroom, and the scar-let splash of bloody vomit all over the white tile.

Due to the alarming rise in casualties of the Korean War, Sally and I were well acquainted with suffering at tender ages. Thousands of blind, burned and amputated soldiers were crowded into Letterman Hospital, where my mother made her periodic (often long) visits as a patient. At age fourteen Sally became a Red Cross volunteer, helping desperately wounded men make toy animals. After two years of volunteering, the Army had to re-move Sally from the hospital wards, because she was “too young” (!)

I remember the feeling of disintegration within our family— we all felt it. My mother grew alarmingly thin, weighing at times only 98 pounds, despite her five-foot, six-inch frame. On a trip to Pine Ridge she dropped a heavy school bell on her foot, opening a new, gaping wound that had to be treated by an emergency clinic at Big Creek, requiring a dangerous, curvy drive from Shaver Lake. Later during this visit to the mountains my mother fainted and had to be driven to Fresno in an ambulance; then from Fresno to San Francisco for hospitalization.
My father had earlier that summer been reassigned to Camp Stewart, Georgia, and missed all this “excitement.” At age fifteen Sally handled each crisis with the same aplomb she had demonstrated beside the lake when our grandmother drowned. My sister, rather than our housekeeper, regularly took on the task of toweling up my mother’s vomit.

I looked on helplessly as I watched my mother’s unconditional love melt away like the wicked witch in “Wizard of Oz” — one of the only movies that I remember the two of us saw together. I did not expect her to die (although she seemed to have some sense that she would) but I felt the gradual loss of her laughter, her love of poetry and nature, and of course, the doting attention she lavished on me.

My father realized, of course, that my mother was too sick for him to continue his new assignment as a battalion commander in Georgia. He resigned his post, and returned to San Francisco. We moved off the post into a lovely apartment in the Marina district, in the heart of the city my mother loved more than life itself. I started a paper route, and made regular visits to Letterman Hospital, where my mother seemed to have taken up residence. No one told me so, but somewhere deep inside I knew that our little family was beginning a deathwatch.

Somehow, through her binges and depressions and days inside the hospital oxygen tent, my mother wrote a stream of letters to my father’s parents in Enid, Oklahoma. Except for Sally’s recollections, these letters are the only relics from this period of my childhood that can be pieced together into a coherent narrative. My own memories of this period of my life have always been too fragmented and painfully raw.

John says that he’s very interested in the violin. His teacher says that he is doing well, but she is being paid to say that. I am not going to force him to do it, because being forced is the reason that I hate the piano to this day. His squeaking sounds awful to me, and Red hasn’t been home enough to help. But I just try to encourage him. We shall see...

I am resting now, and the children get themselves off to school by 8:00 AM. Some-times I don’t wake up until nine. It makes me feel very lazy, but it is good for me...

Johnny loves his etchings. He has put them up all around his wall with Scotch tape. He spent the money you sent him for Boy Scout equipment. Last week he went on an overnight hike to Mt. Diablo. He came home with blisters, and fell out of a tree. He bit through his lip with his teeth. Both are healing, and he’s really being the “man around the house.” He’s not a little boy any more...

Remember Sonny, the half-wit who is son of Cliff and Linda Fields? He fell off his horse and had a concussion. From what I hear, he’s now only a quarter-wit...
Johnny is taking both the piano and violin at school. His squeaking on the violin nearly kills me, but he’s doing well on the piano, with Sally to inspire him....
Sally had a surprise party. John helped me with it, and six girls stayed all night. The week before, she went to her first real “formal” — a school dance at the Fairmont Hotel...

Our Cub Scout den, of which I am the mother, had a nice booth at the Boy Scout Exposition. Johnny and another boy were dressed as knights, and were supposed to explain their work. Of course, I kept losing Johnny just as he was about to explain something, because he was off getting cotton candy or popcorn. But we got a ribbon in spite of him....

Red doesn’t know it, but I had to go back to Letterman three times after he left. I have many good friends among the doctors. Last week I had four blood transfu-sions. It’s not fun to be so weak, and I try to be careful and quiet. Sometimes I wish I could be as happy and old as you are, and just enjoy my grandchildren...
I thought you would enjoy “Baghdad by the Bay” by Herb Caen. (As you will see, it is autographed.) I think some of his writing was quite vivid, unique and imaginative. To me, no place — not New Orleans, or to go farther, Hawaii, Paris, or any-place else — compares with the romance and beauty of San Francisco. (You can see that I am prejudiced)...

Sally has gone to Palo Alto to visit a friend. Red and Johnny are asleep and I’m in a writing mood. As for Johnny, he’s just himself. Not too good at anything, and a daydreamer, but I love him to pieces. His grades are just average. His teacher said that he has a very droll sense of humor, which is no surprise to me. He loves art, and the Mecanno set you sent him last Christmas...

Burr is keeping in touch with my four doctors. I’m certainly getting the best care for $1.65 per day. All the tests would cost a small fortune outside an Army hospital. I’m in a ward with five beds. Two are empty and the other two girls are very nice....

I enjoyed Gladys’ sweet letter and the prayers that they were saying for me. I be-long to a small group here — not exactly a prayer group — we all bring something to read that has inspired us, from any source, and talk about it. Today they were praying for me, and when Sally mentioned that I was ill at school, all the nuns and student body said prayers. God must have heard them, because the doctor said that I was just about gone. I knew I didn’t feel well, but I was conscious and kidding with the nurses. They gave me a blood transfusion, six pints — saved my life. Please tell anyone they can donate blood. .

[Her last letter? In pencil, cramped hand-writing.]

The doctors are splendid and use consultants, the best in their fields, come by frequently and suggest new methods, drugs, etc. Red has been ordered back here, so some good has come out of my illness. He was overtired and tense from the Camp Stewart assignment. Is happy and relaxed now. John goes to camp next Monday. love to Evelyn. Will write Gladys soon. Marian

In late Autumn of 1952 the doctors told my mother that she should prepare for an operation. During her brief visit home from the hospital, she put on her best clothes. With Sally to support her thin frame, she visited her favorite stores along Chestnut Street in the Marina. She lingered with each storekeeper, and bought a pair of gold shoes to wear to the Christmas West Point dinner-dance. This party, a few nights later, was too strenuous for her. My parents, on their last social evening together, were able to stay for only an hour.

Two days later, she entered the hospital for her operation. I remember helping my father carry my mother’s bags to the car while Sally, in a pensive mood, stayed upstairs, peering through the window. Two days later, before the operation could be scheduled, she fell into a coma. My father placed a gardenia on top of her oxygen tent, in the hope that she would awaken to see it, and smell its perfume.

Early in the morning of December 19, 1952 she died.

My father came back to our apartment, his shoulders slumped, her bags in his hands. He told Sally first. “Mummy died very shortly after I got to the hospital this morning, and she never woke up from her coma. I need to get back to the hospital, but wanted to tell you and Johnny first… “

My father spoke a few words, trying to comfort me, then put his arms around me and held me. I tore out of the folds of his raincoat and ran to my bedroom. “I am half an orphan,” I sobbed, struggling to grasp this profound change in my existence. After a long quiet, Sally came to hold me. Most other details from the hours and days that followed are blacked out from my memory...

Except for the funeral, where relatives and friends of my mother alighted like doves in numbers I never imagined possible. Her open coffin was a shock, but Sally had prepared me for this. We held each other’s hands in the Presidio Chapel pew, beneath the stately regimental flags and fragrant Christmas greens, and recited the Lord’s Prayer, as our mother would have said it with Episcopalian formality: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us...”

I remember the graveside service in the hillside military cemetery, with its new graves from the Korean war — enough ornate tombstones and simple white crosses to populate a city.
I remember being by myself for a moment and thinking: I am no longer a child. I have no one but myself to make sure I turn out all right. I can do it. It won’t be easy, but I can do it.

Many years later, I recounted this interior dialog with a therapist. He said (to my surprise): “Someone must have been doing something right. For a child attached so closely to his mother to be able to make that kind of decision speaks volumes about his love for her, and the love others had for him, a love that carries beyond the grave.”

As I now ascend into old age, I suspect that this moment at my mother’s graveside may have been the most precious gift I ever received from her. The energy we receive from those we love never dies, I learned. It passes to us, and from us to others, forever. I learned that day that a person who faces death, really absorbing its awful power, is capable of living each day as if it were his or her last day on earth. I came to know my mother as spirit — the spirit of the one I lost, the spirit of limitless, unconditional love, the spirit of God.