Voices

heard and unheard

July 7, 1975, a pleasant Sunday morning in a Munich home with dear friends, eating buttered brezeln and schinken, watching the final World Cup Match between Germany and the Netherlands, we bantered over wine from the Rhein Pfalz. One of our hosts, an unabashed Arlo Guthrie fan, serenaded us awake in the early morning with his rendition of City of New Orleans: “Good Morning America how are you? Say, don’t you know me, I’m your native son.”^[i]

Sharon and I were indeed native sons, born in Chicago, awash in European culture, living in Austria, me a scientist at the International Atomic Energy Agency, Sharon writing dispatches home to Chicago Magazine chronicling our peripatetic travels in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

It is time to still the voices

I listen to what remains

Pick and choose among the choices

Travel to other domains

1975 saw the end of American and Vietnamese agony in Southeast Asia on April 30. In August I would be called away from Sofia, Bulgaria, to rush to my mother’s hospital bed in Chicago where she lay dying, the end of a journey begun in the Spring of 1920, a life of poverty and abuse, a runaway to get married at 16, bearing me before 18, abandoned by her husband at 18, committed to a tuberculosis sanitarium at 22, treated for bilateral breast cancer at 50, dead at 54.

The previous August 9^th, Nixon had resigned and despite the financial turmoil of war and the 1973 oil crisis, America had begun its recovery in time to usher in the nation’s 200^th anniversary July 4, 1976, festivities we would attend with friends on the mall of Washington DC. The world was restored to stasis.

During our European sojourn we had not heard Arlo Guthrie sing City of New Orleans or Randy Newman sing Good Old Boys.^[ii] America was rarely in our rear-view mirror despite Sharon’s literary connections.

The world tilts away from me

As if to find tranquil space

To burst the bright filigree

Binding me to this place

In the end, the world did not rest. America, despite the existential turmoil of 5 decades, was poised on a mountain peak with no view, the terrain to the horizon shrouded in an impenetrable mist. My West Point classmates and army comrades returned home—some—the metastable future confronted a forlorn cadre of political figures, titans of industry, academics and a public unprepared for what would soon confront them. But July 4, 1976, much like the “phony war” in Europe from September 1939, to May 1940, veiled forces that were accumulating to release the pent-up antagonisms roiling below the surface of human affairs.

The great void will never speak

Secrets bound to earth and sky

Beyond reach of my critique

Prospect alone may reply

Sharon and I now sit in our apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a retired scientist and a writer, privileged to have known the world, comfortably commuting between a 19^th century Washington DC townhouse and our Manhattan apartment. We contemplate a compromised future as I recover from radical surgery to treat a recurrent cancer that has bedeviled us for the past 4 years. We understand the future and we reach forward with hope but it is the past, imperfect memory, a rapidly diminishing cohort of family, friends, colleagues and associates that litters a fading trail.

There is hidden energy

Within all around beyond

This is not an elegy

There is no need to respond

I am not finished. Not yet.

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^[i] Writer/Composer Steve Goodman, original recording 1971 debut album, Buddah records. Popularized by Arlo Guthrie in 1972 on his album, “Hobo’s Lullaby.”

^[ii] Randy Newman, Good Old Boys, 1974, Reprise Records.