Pretty big snowstorm predicted for tomorrow – and here I thought, early-March, that we’d dodged all that.
Worst on Wednesday, and I don’t have to be on campus, so I can enjoy the views from my living room in Garrett Park.
Have been making many fires, enjoying hearth and home. Herds of young deer race about at the top of our hill. I watch them while the fire crackles. Aroma of sweet smoke. Silence all around.
Or the sound of many birds – some cardinals have built a nest in the house gutters, and the babies pip when the food comes in. There are hawks, high up, and, at night, owls. These also are things to see and hear.
John, next door neighbor, waylays me as I gather wood – wants to talk about the nature park we share. His big camera is around his neck; his big cat is tied up a few feet away. John misses his mother, who died two months ago. This what he does instead of visiting her.
He tells me everything he’s seen – a large fox, two hawks…
It’s true that you can become engrossed in the wildlife. The carnage alone – rabbit skulls, fallen cooper’s hawks – is fascinating. I’ve found antlers, of course; and bright feathers.
With the large herd of deer there’s deershit along all the paths I’ve created. They turn out to be deer paths. Doing all I can to make their lives more pleasant. If I leave a molecule of taste on a discarded plastic container, racoons take it out of the recycling and then drop it deep in the forest. I go through, every couple of weeks, cleaning out their trash.
I’m right now sitting surrounded by my students at a very sunny seminar table – windows the length of the walls on two sides. They are taking their midterm. Crayola blue sky, not a cloud. Sharp edges of colorless federal buildings against the blue.
The city is quiet. Faint engine sounds and nothing else. It’s only 9:30. Rush hour has quieted down, and people are settling into their offices. Far-off contrails up there. But really, little to see.
Only the beautiful faces of my students. They are hunching, writing. They are sniffing, coughing, blowing their noses. Yes, to me, as they scratch their ways across blue books, they are very beautiful.
Single-space, double-space, use both sides of the page? They have asked me these questions, and I have answered them.
There’s a monastic stillness even here, a twenty-first century urban university. A quiet blue sky and only the white noise of heat and lighting. I’ve left the door to the room open because it’s quiet in the hallway too. An occasional chat among adjuncts in a nearby office is all.
I keep the time on the blackboard. 10:04, I write.
Normalcy is the great thing. John Wilpers’ New York Times obit ends by quoting him:
“All of this was very sad,” he said of the war. “I didn’t want to do anything to describe it as wonderful. What happened happened. Like any war, it should be regretted.”
Absence of war. Absence of conflict. Now the Presidential helicopter flies by the seminar room (even the helicopter is quiet). Twelve years ago Connie, the English department office manager, watched from her office as the Pentagon burned. I never forget where I am, what my city is. Its bland buildings and bright sky never fool me.
Still, it’s not Karachi. Metro authorities instruct us in the dimensions of dangerous packages, but we’re not really looking. We’re trusting the normalcy of the setting, our lucky country, our city the heart of our lucky country.
In 2000, Garrett Park’s median family income was $126,662. Widowers like John Wilpers, father of my oldest friend, live well, in houses whose value has quintupled since they bought them.
In my house, Munro Leaf – author of Ferdinand, a peaceful book, lived and died.
In the first image accompanying this BBC obituary for John Wilpers, his daughter, UD‘s oldest friend, holds a photograph of her father having captured and kept from suicide Tojo.
The article says Wilpers died in a Garrett Park nursing home, but there are no nursing homes here. He died, I assume, in the Garrett Park house he’d lived in for… what? Sixty years, I guess. When UD’s family came back from England (a year-long immunology fellowship for UD‘s father), they moved across the street from the Wilpers family, and UD and Terry became close friends.
UD regarded Terry’s father as a bland well-meaning parental thing – hardly the sort to hold a gun to Tojo and to his doctor, and order the doctor to fix Tojo’s attempted-suicide wound.
****************************
The New York Times obituary.
******************
UD thanks Jon.
UD just whispered these words to Mr UD as he fell asleep.
Mr UD insists that UD vote, even in the primaries, so after she taught her classes he picked her up at Grosvenor Metro and they drove to Holy Cross Elementary School (they usually vote at UD‘s elementary school, Garrett Park, but the main building’s being demolished and a new building’s going up).
As they walked from the car to the polling place, UD read, loudly, in the voice of Major “King” Kong, instructions on how to vote.
The instructions were in the booklet Mr UD had just handed her. He’d written UD‘s Polish name –Madzia – on the top of the first page of the booklet.
Inside the booklet were mock ballots on which he’d carefully marked every person UD was to vote for. Aside from Barbara Mikulski and Chris Van Hollen, UD recognized no name in the booklet. (Check out picture # 5 on Van Hollen’s website. That’s my neighbor, John Wilpers; his daughter Terry is just about my oldest friend. I wrote about John here.) As is always the case when Mr UD forces her to vote in primaries, she simply does what she is told.
There were very few people in the polling place, most of them fellow Garrett Parkers. UD was handed a computer card and escorted to a little booth, where she quickly touch-screened all the names Mr UD told her to enter. The whole thing took twenty seconds.
Mr UD took forever. “I was rereading my ballot,” he said, “to make sure everything was right.”
On the way back to the car, UD railed – again loudly – about the travesty of making Americans vote at a religious school.
LAST TIME I LOOKED THIS WAS A DEMOCRACY. ANYBODY HERE HEARD OF SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE? ANYBODY? ON OUR WAY INTO THE BUILDING WE WALKED DIRECTLY UNDER AN ENORMOUS CROSS. YOU MEAN TO TELL ME THAT HAS NO EFFECT ON PEOPLE? LAST TIME I LOOKED…
The Major Kong thing, the loud railing church and state thing — These are the ways UD makes unpalatable events palatable.
***************************************
Update:
Thanks, Phil.
After the massive snow, a sudden and massive spring in Garrett Park.
As I walked my acre just now, picking up small limbs from yesterday’s windstorm and large limbs from last month’s snowstorm, I saw the son of friends of ours. They live at the bottom of Rokeby Avenue.
He was bent over in the forest adjacent to our place, examining white flowers. He’s La Kid’s age, studying to be a chef.
“Find any unusual plants?” he asked me. He held open in his hand a guidebook to edible plants. “I’m foraging.”
“Funny you should ask. These … crocuses? … look new to me. I’ve got plenty of smaller ones, lighter purple. These are different.”
“Those are Russian crocuses. They’re
darker. Kind of shimmery gray on the
outside when they open up.”
“How did they get here? Suddenly?
So many of them?”
“The wind maybe.”
“Squirrels.”
“Definitely squirrels.”
“But listen. I find all sorts of strange things in the back.” I motioned to the purple field behind me. “Feel free to forage my territory.”
A car horn beeped.
“That’s my mom. Thanks! I’d like that.”
*******************************************
Another Snapshot from Home, if I may. This one also involves a plant.
A few months ago, Mr UD drove a neighbor – an older man, who no longer drives – around Silver Spring for a few hours as he did some errands. The man, John Wilpers, brought a flowering plant to our house as a gesture of thanks.
(I was very close friends with Terry, one of John’s children, when I was growing up in Garrett Park. She works in Baltimore now. We’re still friends.)
But that’s not the snapshot from home. Here’s the snapshot from home. I’ll give it this headline:
GARRETT PARKER WINS
BRONZE STAR
FOR SAVING TOJO’S LIFE
Washington Post:
More than six decades after the end of World War II, a retired U.S. Army colonel this week received the Bronze Star Medal for his part in the arrest in 1945 of Japan’s principal wartime prime minister, Gen. Hideki Tojo.
The medal, one of the highest honors conferred by the military for combat actions, was awarded to John J. Wilpers, now 90 and living in Garrett Park.
… In January 1947, Wilpers’s commanding officer at the time of the arrest recommended Wilpers for the Bronze Star Medal for his actions Sept. 10-11, 1945. The paperwork describes how Wilpers located Tojo’s Tokyo residence and broke in after hearing a gunshot.
Once inside, Wilpers found that Tojo — who knew his arrest was imminent — had shot himself in the chest. Wilpers reportedly secured Tojo’s weapons and found a Japanese physician who, “faced with Captain Wilpers’ .38 caliber revolver,” administered first aid until U.S. medical officers could arrive.
… What happened to the original recommendation is unknown; it apparently did not make it through the chain of command, or might have gotten lost, said Lt. Col. Mike Moose, a public affairs officer with the Army’s Human Resources Command.
… Wilpers’s family did not learn about his involvement in the arrest of Tojo, who was eventually tried and executed for war crimes, until his son Michael stumbled upon his name while studying at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Wilpers did not pursue the forgotten award until 2002, when he contacted the Awards Branch of the military. In a typewritten letter he wrote: “Dear sir, In the process of putting my military records in order (old geezers tend to do this when they suspect that they may be nearing the long slow slide to Forest Lawn), I came across the attached 1947 recommendation . . . for an award . . . If the recommendation was not approved, just a phone message would do. If it was approved, I would prefer the simplest notification possible… “
