Excerpt: "Don't Worry, It'll Grow Back"
Due out in January 2010
Don Cowfer, I’d learn later, was a two-Purple Heart and Bronze Star recipient from the Battle of The Bulge, the six-week long German offensive fought during the deep winter of 1944-45 in which 80,987 American soldiers were killed (how many in Iraq, in nine years?). Don is a gentleman in every way. Business-like in business matters, he told me that there were many times when a customer was having troubles or was just depressed, and he would stop cutting hair and just have a word of prayer with that person. I liked that.
But Don and his history brought to mind another soldier, and how two men from the same generation ended up so different.
Charles Franklin Thorne, Jr. was 17 years old with a ninth grade education and no discernable manners, soft brown eyes and a toothy, salesman’s smile. He nearly dropped his coffee mug when Carolyn Whitney, then 14, walked into the Hilltop Grill in Augusta with her cousin in October of 1940. Hazel bristled at his reaction to her younger cousin—bright blonde hair, porcelain skin, hourglass early-onset figure—and made strong attempts to intercept Charlie’s advances, to no avail. Carolyn was also smitten, and, when she weighed the dozen years held captive by her aging grandparents (and being kept in a virtual closet by her well-meaning cousin) against freedom in the arms of anyone, there was no contest. But there was something else about this guy, this Charlie Thorne. He was warm, with a good sense of humor. She didn’t know if he had plans or dreams, and she didn’t care.
“He looked at my eyes,” she said to Hazel on the walk home from the diner.
“What?”
“He didn’t stare at these,” she said, waggling her index finger from one ample breast to the other, “he looked me in the eye.” Rosemary couldn’t remember a boy who’d done that before.
To his credit, Charlie allowed the girl to grow up a bit and, in March of 1942, he proposed with a ring bearing the tiniest of diamonds. Charlie courted her, put on his best dog and pony act and they should have been married within the year.
Then Charlie was drafted.
He kissed his fiancé, promised her he’d be back, and boarded a bus for Texas.
After basic training, Charlie was assigned to the First Infantry Division, the “Fighting First,” or the “Big Red One,” because of the red uniform patch with the large number “1” in the middle. 16th Regiment. 3rd Battalion. Lima Company. His commanding officer was Captain John R. Armellino, of Haverhill, Massachusetts, and Charlie didn’t like him, not one bit. In fact, he’d boasted—though not to the man himself—how he would someday fatten the lip of the ‘loud-mouthed guinea’. Charlie didn’t really like the Army, either, if he told the truth, but to say so aloud might be construed as treason. So he kept his mouth shut, which, as anyone who had ever known Charlie Thorne could tell you, was no small feat.
When Captain Armellino, the ‘friggin’ wop,’ ordered him to exit the landing craft first, alongside him, on the sixth of June, 1944, ‘to save the frogs’ worthless asses,’ Charlie only glared at him. He looked angry. In fact, he was scared to death.
When the ramp was lowered from the amphib—stuck in a sandbar 200 yards from the damn beach—Armellino, along with Charlie and two others, slid down the ramp and into the cold English Channel as automatic rifle fire from German strongholds high above the beach wizzed all around them. Under the weight of his gear and his M1 Garand, wrapped in plastic, the hydrophobic and sea-sickened Charlie’s Mae West was insufficient to keep his head above water. In panic, he kicked and pushed against the legs of his fellow soldiers, but could not gain the surface. Great, he thought, the Krauts won’t get me, but I’ll drown! Right before he gave up the fight, one in his company behind him off the launch, maybe DuFresne, pulled him up by his knapsack. He spit and coughed and found his feet on the sandbar, while the bullets kept whizzing and whining like a swarm of bees on speed.
Insanely making way for the beach against such fire, Charlie quickly scanned for a sign of his Captain and the two others in his squad. When he couldn’t find them, he thought: How long was I under the water? It would be two full days before Charlie learned that the trio had been swiftly cut down by rifle fire before their feet had even left the ramp. He felt only a twinge of remorse for his prior feelings about the Captain, but was moved to private tears at the news of the other two, friends he’d made in boot camp even though they were probably Jews: Virgil and Isaac, from New York.
The war ended and Private First Class Charlie Thorne came home to marry his sweetheart. In her haste to extricate herself from her family, Carolyn Whitney failed to observe that the wonderful fire she’d felt that day at the Hilltop six years earlier was gone from her new husband’s eyes, stolen by an unseen intruder and left to die on a cold beach in France.
Charlie Thorne sired four children, and I am his third. He never spoke to me or my siblings about whatever happened “over there”, so, as I grew up and matured, I had no reason to believe it was all nothing more than a smidgeon of his long-ago past. I’m pretty sure I’m quite wrong about that, now.
Because the older I get—which is not yet old, according to Jerry Sturwold, one of my barbers—more and more I can see how the experiences of my younger years have real impact on how I live my life now; the decisions I make, the manner in which I triage difficulties and problems are funneled through the lessons from those years. It is important to note that none of the experiences in my younger years involved dog-paddling in freezing water while a company of enemy combatants tried to kill me. Nor do they include crouching in a hole and surveying the beach to see thousands of my compatriots—and parts of them—floating in the surf and lying dead on the sand.
Which is to say that I’ve come to an understanding of the reasons for the distance between my father and me as I grew up. Something—lots of somethings, I suppose—happened over there. The horror of battle and its brutal devaluation of life, all life, sucked some primordial and existential fiber from my father, and the millions of other fathers, and, to my way of thinking, was forever lost.
Dad and I had our first real conversation ever in my apartment in Knoxville while I was in Law School. He was seventy-five years old. We both spoke and listened. It was cathartic and sad at the same time. He made an admission to me that came as close to being selfless as was possible for him.
“I should have been around more when you were growing up,” he told me in a somber voice. Seated across from me on the sofa, he looked defeated. Dad worked a lot when I was young, ostensibly to make damn sure that his four kids were provided for. However, being programmed a lot like him, I know his reasons for staying away so much weren’t all altruistic; he was escaping.
He continued. “I know that I felt like I needed to make sure you and your brother and sisters had what you needed, but I now know that you needed something else. You needed me. You needed me to be emotionally there for you.” This was my father talking, the one who never used the word “emotionally” before in my presence. “If you ever have a family, don’t make the same mistake I did. Be there for your children.” I’d heard about fatherly advice, but I couldn’t ever remember receiving any. It was refreshing and, as I said, cathartic.
After he said this, I looked deeply into his eyes, and that’s when I saw it.
I saw that it wasn’t me he felt badly about, it was him! He was saddened because of all that he’d missed out on as we grew. I had seen those eyes once before.
I was playing baseball, Babe Ruth league and, although I’d been a good pitcher in Little League, the mound was a lot further away now and I was just starting out in Babe Ruth so I wasn’t pitching yet. But I was fast, and so was put in left field. Second string. My friend Brian Geroux was up to bat, and I’d been watching him all game from the bench, pounding deep drives over the head of the center-fielder. Two or three times in this game already. When I finally made it into the game, I was ready.
When Brian began his swing, I turned and ran like the wind towards deep center. Sure enough, Brian smacked it out there. I tracked the fly ball over my shoulder as I ran and, miraculously, as I extended my glove, the ball found it. It truly was a great catch.
At the end of the inning, I ran in to the bench, where Dad was just arriving to pick me up. When he got to the dugout area, fifteen people mobbed him.
“Oh my God, you missed it! Your son just made the most amazing catch I’ve ever seen,” was what they were saying. I looked at Dad. Those eyes. Yep. He’d missed it and, yep, he felt like crap.
Well, that’s what I saw that day in my apartment in Knoxville. He’d missed it. All of it. And he was sad.
What I took from that is a large part of why I gave up practicing law in favor of barbering. Truth be told, I enjoyed practicing law. I knew it wouldn’t be long before I started making real good money again, and I liked having the knowledge to help people out of jams.
What I didn’t like (if I’d freely admit it) was how the constant state of being adversarial made me behave. Always on the defensive, always ready to fight, always suspicious of the motive of others, I tended to see the world in a most cynical way. Which is all well and good if one can turn it off and leave it behind. Well, lawyers cannot, most likely due to the fact that the vast majority of their day is involved at some level in the practice of law. It was that way with me. Sixteen, seventeen hours a day. No, not always in the office or the courthouse, but on the phone, the computer, putting out fires for my clients. And thinking. A lot. Did I cross that ‘T’, did I dot that “i”? Did I miss a filing? Did I do all I could do for that client? The questions plagued me, and the time just flew.
I didn’t want to be that kind of father.
But I now can see why my father did, at least to a point. He was a good provider. He knew how to do that. It just never occurred to him that he was actually missing out on his own life. But he taught me that lesson, in his own unknowing and unknown way.
They called his the “Greatest Generation,” and for good reason.
Dad had his first heart attack in July of 1969. It was a mild heart attack, but back then—before doctors inserted stints as easily as splints—it was a serious matter. (Mom had a heart attack the other day—at age 83—and was bored and ready to go home the next day). From then on, for the next thirty years, Dad’s health plagued him. Often, I’d get a call saying he was going in the hospital and “he might not come out this time.” I got complacent, having heard the boy call ‘wolf’ enough. In March of 2002, a Saturday, I got the same call and gave it my nonchalant ‘okay.’ Sunday, around noon, my brother called to say that he’d lost the battle this time. I wish I could say I was shocked, but the only thing I felt was relief.
He’d wanted to die for so long, and now it was over.
Fathers and sons, one generation to the next, are a perpetuation of life giving life giving life that molds and shapes our very existence. I have two sons. Twins. Now they are six years old and now I get it.
Because some things they do make like they used to.