When the Past Connects to the Present

 

He was in his mid twenties with long, Braveheart-style hair only clean and looking like a photographer's fan should be blowing it back away from his perfect face. He was tall, muscles in all the right places, flat mid-section and his eyes---heck, I’d be lying if I said I noticed what color they were but I’m assuming they were like pools of dark chocolate. Let’s cut to the chase; he was tall, dark and handsome and I picked his checkout lane at Lowe’s because...well, his was the only one open but if I were inclined to embellish this story I’d say I picked it because he made my heart go pitter-patter. 

He took my check and stared at it for the longest time. I thought maybe I’d made a mistake and put the year 1967 down instead of 2017. I’ve been living in that year every day since I started re-reading the letters from the fifty penpals I had back during the Vietnam War. Finally he said, “You have beautiful handwriting.” Oh. My. God! That’s exactly what made so many G.I.s I had sent Christmas cards to want to write me back. That and the Avon Unforgettable perfume I sprayed on the envelopes. But I digress. “It’s nearly perfect,” he added. It wasn’t and I had an urge to say, “That’s my in-a-hurry writing. I can do better. Let me write you another check.” I didn’t. I kept that thought in my head.

“Did you know that Steve Jobs studied calligraphy with a monk before he started Apple?” he asked. “I do,” I replied and then he said, “Isn’t it ironic that a guy who credited his love of calligraphy for the fact that computers now come with lots of typefaces would become the very guy who is making cursive writing obsolete.” Wow, that’s mind blowing! I thought but I replied something about how they don’t even teach cursive in schools anymore and how someday there will be scholars who will do nothing but translate cursive. The guy was clearly in love with my handwriting and he seemed reluctant to put the check in his drawer. If I had been his age, I would have written my name and phone number on a piece of paper and slipped it into his shirt pocket. We made that kind of connection. Well, not exactly. I was in lust with his mind and body and he was fascinated with the mathematical precision of my penmanship and how Jobs could write coding for that, but it’s my story so if I want to suggest our connection could'a run deeper in a boy/girl kind of way if only that age thing hadn’t been an issue, I can. 

I came right home and googled Steve Jobs and I found an article about a speech he made at Stanford’s 2005 graduation ceremony. He talked about his time spent learning calligraphy and how it influenced how Apples were built to include different fonts and typefaces and how that in turn influenced Microsoft to follow suit. "You can’t connect the dots looking forward," he told the grads. "You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something---your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." 

Being the age I am, I saw the truth in Steve’s words. When we’re young we try a little of this and a little of that, haphazardly tasting what life has to offer. It’s only through the passing of time that we can see the trajectory our lives took, how all the parts fit together. I see that in the letters I’ve been re-reading. I was so young and innocent back in 1967 and not afraid to take on the world. In 1967 and 1968 I saw both the highest and lowest points in my entire life and who would have thought that 50 years later I would go to a lecture about war letters that would cause me to revisit that pivotal era in my life and in such a close-up and detailed way.

I’m three quarters of the way through the letter reading project and it finally dawned on me to get out the journals I kept during that time frame and compare them to the copies I kept of the letters I wrote to my G.I. penpals. Two sentences jumped out at me and they changed the watercolor memory of a serviceman I dated for a year after he came home and who broke my heart and spirit in ways I’ve never written or talked about. It went something like: “He scares me sometimes. When we’re horsing around he’s not quick to let me go when I tell him to stop.” Those sentences sent chills down my spine. There's no way of knowing where that aggressiveness would have led if we had stayed together but I do know I'm on a cathartic journey that is connecting all the dots in my life.

Steve Jobs said you have to believe in something and I pick destiny. Destiny put me in a checkout lane for a brief liaison with a young guy who loved my penmanship. He might have loved it for an entirely different reason than my G.I. penpals did, but his expression as he studied my check could have been the same mesmerized look that stared at my envelopes at Mail Call back in 1967. Having beautiful penmanship changed my life.  ©

1967, a Year of Lost Innocence

Re-reading copies of letters I wrote back in 1967 I hardly recognized that starry-eyed, flag-waving girl I was back then when 'she' was on a mission to write to as many guys stationed in Vietnam as she could. Troops over there, that year, increased to a total of 475,000 and peace rallies turned into war protests erupted around the world, becoming more and more intense and frequent. I was clearly on the side of Uncle Sam and by the end of the year the country and many of us in it had lost our innocence---me in more ways than one.

1967 was also the year when Twiggy was a fashion sensation that started women on a path of viewing our bodies in an unhealthy and unrealistic way and we are still dealing with her legacy all these years later. It was also the year when 7,000 National Guards were sent to Detroit to put down the race rioting and looting in the streets and those scenes were repeated across the nation, including right in my own back yard where one of my co-workers couldn’t go home for nearly a week because her whole neighborhood was blocked off by the police.  

In 1967 the Beatles came out with their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band album and I have two hats in my closet, bought in the ‘60s that I affectionately call my Sgt. Pepper hats. One hat is white fur and the other is red velvet and the latter one is what I wore when I got my picture taken so I’d have photos to send the servicemen I was penpals with. By the second or third letter I received from a G.I. a picture was usually requested. Also requested was the name of the perfume I sprayed on my envelopes. It was Avon’s Unforgettable and I could probably write an entire essay just quoting the various comments I received about that perfume. One guy said at Mail Call the guys would pass my letters around before he could even open them. Another guy said any girl who "smells like that and has such beautiful handwriting has to be pretty." Several guys said they carried my letters around in their helmets so they could smell the perfume---in one case, when the smell of jungle rot got too much and in another case, the guy wanted to “remember what girls smell like.” One guy said he was charging ten cents for a quick sniff---probably a joke since the guys don't use cash in the military.

Yes, I’ve been staying up way too late reading the letters I’ve decided to send off to the Center for American War Letters. The servicemen’s letters are in good condition, but unfortunately my letters will all have to be redone because they are carbon copies on cheap paper that did not fare well over time. But since the curator of the legacy project said they will welcome the back and forth of pen pals, and since they do accept copies, that’s what they’ll get from my side of the exchanges---if my fingers hold up with all the typing I’ll be doing over winter.

After I read a complete set of letters between me and a particular guy, I look him up on the index of names listed on the Vietnam War Memorial. What a heart-pounding task that’s turning out to be! With one guy out of the thirty I've read so far, I took it a step farther and found him on the internet living about fifty miles away. We had a brother/sister like exchange of eight to ten page letters about every subject on earth including Twiggy. He had a girlfriend back here in the States who was planning their wedding and he had his whole life plotted out. Near the end of our letter exchanges, he was giving me dating advice. (I wasn't give guys a fair chance. Who knew.) Re-reading his letters brought on an urge to send him a note with no return address on the envelope. I’m not sending it until Christmas---IF I do it at all, a full circle kind of thing since our penpalling started at Christmas 1966. I can’t decide if a note could cause trouble for the guy, or not. What do you think? I’ve never been the jealous type so it’s hard for me to predict how a wife would react. If I do it, this is what I'll say:

"If you’re not the ______ _______ who was stationed at Da Dang in 1967 please disregard this note. If you are, you may (or may not) remember a brother/sister type penpal friendship we had back then. Either way, recently I went to a lecture about war letters and it reminded me of our exchange and that I’ve owed you a letter for the past fifty years. That war was a defining era for so many people. I hope the plans you had for your post-military life came to pass. As for me, I found my soulmate a few years later and as they say, we lived “happily ever after.” I hope you find the intended humor and sentimentality in me sending this note all these years later. Sincerely, Jean _______ (the floral designer)"    ©

 

P.S. 8/2025 I decided against trying to connect with any of the guys I'd been pen pals with, this guy included. I look some of them up on the Vietnam War Memorial though to see if they made it home or not.

 

s

My Sgt. Pepper Hat, 1967

From Walls of Sorrow to Freedom of Speech

I was in the house with the windows closed and the air conditioner going when I heard a thunderous roar that I couldn’t identify. After checking around the house, I went out my front door where I could see the road leading to the baseball park. It was filled with motorcycle riders, their rolling rumble piercing my ears. Over two hundred, I read later. They were the escort riders for the Wall That Heals, the mobile exhibit that would be in town for the next four days. It’s a 250 foot, ½ scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall on the National Mall in D.C. and its 24 panels contain more than 58,000 names of those who didn’t make it home. I’ve seen the actual Wall in Washington D.C. and it was an emotional experience. I had penpal relationships with over fifty guys over in ‘Nam spread out over four-five years and I tried to look them up in the index book by the Wall, but after finding a few listed I just couldn’t continue. It was too haunting and hard. I left behind a poem I wrote, tucked in a seam between two panels of the Wall. A very dark poem filled with unspeakable pain about one of those penpals who I had met in person and who nearly destroyed me. 

The traveling replica was in our state once before and Don and I went to see it. This time it was my husband who left haunted by the experience. At the very end of the 24^th panel was a homemade sign on a stake that contained the name of a friend of Don's. It said he’d died of Agent Orange. This was in the ‘90s, just after our government finally got around to acknowledging the connection between Agent Orange and all the medical problems the guys who were exposed to those chemicals suffered. My husband’s friend had taken his own life just weeks before his wife placed that hand-painted sign at the replica Wall. He was a good guy, a guy who endured too much pain to stick around.

This week, when I heard the mobile Wall was going to be in the neighborhood I thought about going. I decided against it but the thunderous roar of the escort riders gave my mind’s eye perfect recall of the emotions that I didn’t want to revisit. You’d think after fifty years the edges of darkness would be dulled down, you’d think by now I could tell my story, the one in the poem I left behind in D.C. But I can’t. I’m not unique. Everyone who goes to ‘The Wall’ has a story of regrets, sorrows and what-ifs---many, like mine, are still held close to the vest.

When the Wall That Heals caravan reached the field where the Wall would be displayed a ceremony took place that included four vintage airplanes flying over my neighborhood. A relative put a video of them on Facebook circling around the field, thick streaks of smoke trailing behind them. I saw them when they passed over my house in close formation before they started their tribute. They made me sad but my nephew-in-law who posted the video commented that he was “honored to see them.” The Vietnam War ended before he was old enough to get drafted but the war was the backdrop to his entire childhood. He’s also an avid Trump supporter.

Civil War Union Army General William T. Sherman is noted for saying, "I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell." Yet here we are again, this time teetering on the edge of a nuclear war. And why? Because two bullies are itching to have a quick draw contest to see who has the biggest dick? If they don’t ratchet the rhetoric down, the next memorial wall we build will have the names of those lost to a nuclear war and its fallout and it might be long enough to double as Trump’s border wall.

I have mixed feelings on what it means to be patriotic in the year 2017. How can anyone claim to honor the flag and fallen soldiers and at the same time support a president who doesn’t respect free speech? We fought a war to cement that cornerstone into our Constitution. We are in dangerous territory with this president! He demonizes the press at every opportunity, then this past weekend it was six black athletes who were taking a knee in peaceful protest during the national anthem that he labeled "son-of-a-bitches" and called for boycotting the NFL until they are fired. Trump seems bent on dividing us, starting a culture war. We don’t have to like or agree with the point those athletes are trying to make about racial injustices but it is important that we all understand it’s their First Amendment right to dissent. Countries that demand total respect for their flags and anthems are call dictatorships. What comes after threats of getting fired? Jail time? A bullet in the head? What would Kim Jong-un do? What would an unfettered Trump do?

Taking a knee in peaceful protest historically goes back to Martin Luther King Jr. in the ‘60s. And have we forgotten Hall-of-Famer baseball legend Jackie Robinson? He didn’t kneel but as he wrote in his autobiography, "I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world." Times have changed since 1947 when he broke the color barrier in baseball but anyone who thinks that Lady Justice is color blind in 2017 is lying to themselves. I doubt Trump cares about the kneeling as much as he cares about distracting everyone from his ineptness in office. ©

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

 James Waterman Wise

1936, The Christian Century