| Author | Message | ||
     Mark Fuhrman Citizen Username: Mfpark Post Number: 900 Registered: 9-2001  |
Two guys got onto the 2 Downtown Express this morning, around 7:20 AM. Does it matter that one was very large in all dimensions with a florid face, or that the other had a buzzcut, steely blue eyes, and wore a Harley Davidson waistcoat? The larger one, in a booming sotto voce that carried to half the car, said, "You hear that Marine capped that guy in Iraq?" "Yah, they should promote him, give him a medal." "Damn straight. That's what they should do to all of them, shoot them in the head." "Why the hell did they let the tape run? Someone should have pressed the erase button, held it down for a while." "TV guy's trying to make a name for himself." "Gonna get himself shot, you know." "Yah [chuckles]. I were him I would get out of Iraq fast before one of them guys takes him out." "They wave the white flag, sucker you in, then shoot you." "I hear they are boobytrapping wounded bodies so our guys get blown up when they try to help." "Shoot them all, soon as you see the white flag. S'what they'd do to us." "I'm with you on that." They got off at 14th Street. How do you respond to two guys casually discussing the murder of unarmed men while sipping their coffees on a swaying subway train? If the wounded was a cop who had been capped in the station last night, these guys would be joining the mob with torches and pitchforks. But Iraq is half-way around the world, and they are safe in their subway car running a little late on their way to work. This morning when I was listening to the news, before I left for work, I wondered how this would play in Iraq. Would the Iraqi's get more enraged about the killing of a wounded unarmed man, take to the streets hating Americans even more? Or would some reflect on the wonder of a country where something like this is made public, where there is some accountability? Would they think of the decades of torture and murders under Saddam that went unspoken, as compared to one act that was caught on tape and then broadcast to the world, and think we are fools for being so open? The Arab Street. The American Street. Perhaps not so far apart as it may seem. | ||
| Mark Fuhrman Citizen Username: Mfpark Post Number: 918 Registered: 9-2001 |
It is interesting how lessons learned in youth keep resonating through our lives. My high school economics teacher, a long, lean, craggy New Englander named John or Jack or something like that, taught us microeconomics straight out of Samuelson's latest edition, with a salty, sardonic running commentary. But his best lessons came in the asides of flinty New England philosophy that spilled out when he was bored, or simply bemused. He was the first to open my eyes to the wonders of legally abusing the tax code. Jack (or John) had a small antiques business on the side, that he ran out of his house. He turned his garage into a showroom and workshop, set up a separate entrance from his house, and voila, instant tax write off (this was in 1975). Then he really got going--the pickup truck got double declining balance depreciation, his snowblower (so necessary for maintaining access to his business) was an immediate write-off, as was the lawnmower, exterior lighting, on and on. It was an "honors" track class, and everyone in it was heading to a four year college (not typical for the school). One day Jack/John came in and asked what makes the kids in this class different from someone living in a ghetto, say South Bronx or Harlem (again, this was 1975). He said that even if we lost everything and were forced to live in a run-down apartment in the worst area of the world, we would do something to make it nicer. Pull up some flowers and put a pot on the windowsill. Scrub the walls and floors, scrounge some paint for the walls, do something to gain a modicum of control over our space, make a statement to ourselves if only for an instant. An early lesson in class dynamics. I reacted instinctively at the time against this paternalistic classism, but truly I did wonder if he was more right than not. I think of Jack/John now that I have moved out of my family house, and into an apartment building slated for demolition sometime in the next year. After 25 years of sharing my space with someone else, I am alone, cash-strapped, and faced with the reality of old moldy carpeting, warping wood floors beneath it, layers of dust on every surface. Almost as a reflex, I pulled up all the old carpet, washed every surface twice, bought incense. No, Maplewood is not a ghetto, my apartment has new windows and whitewashed walls, and my circumstances are certainly different economically, but the drive to establish my own space, make my imprint, create a home, is deep and instinctive, likely class-bred but as eternal as taxes. | ||
| Mark Fuhrman Citizen Username: Mfpark Post Number: 939 Registered: 9-2001 |
Ah, the end of Vampire Days, at least for a weekend! I actually slept until the sun rose this morning, the first day in many where I will not walk to and from the train in the dark, as absent of daylight as if I lived in Iceland. I am inspired to take a slow jog around the park. Maplewood is satisfying in a simple way, especially with the sun peeking over College Hill on a clear sky early winter morning. And especially so when there are few people and cars out, most houses still and unlit, curtains pulled, whisps of furnace smoke idling out of chimneys as set-backs kick in. This morning is cold and crisp, about 32 degrees, slightly frozen leaves crunching softly underfoot. A thin haze of frost coats the baseball fields, even the infields, and the grass all around, except for where the sun is creating a melting boundary. As I rumble up the slight hill in front of the station, a train pulls in from New York and for a second we are moving forward in tandem. A small, dark man in a thin leather jacket, hands stuffed in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold, lopes off the train and heads into town--to work, to see a friend? Down the hill in the park on the macadam path, near the bottom, I run on the bridge over the duck pond. The water is supernaturally still and leaden, dark and unreflective in its stolidity. Can you actually see water growing denser as it nears the ice state? I feel the heaviness of it like a weight on the world, or perhaps it is just a projection of my own thickening middle and thighs that have started settling in for the long winter of my life. Along Valley Street with a bit more traffic beside me, two men have their black dogs off-leash in the baseball field, one throwing a ball, the other a frisbee. They look lie fly fishermen casting into a cold stream. Their arms go back in unison, pitch forward and then a black dog skeins out in front of them line a fly line, looping more or less straight toward the ball/frisbee as it lands, catching it up in their mouths and looping back downstream to await the next cast. Over and over. The dogs are grinning from ear to ear, tails dancing as they run, content to be doing exactly what they are meant to do. Past the beautiful Town Hall building set back with large columns, and a house newly on the market, my legs feeling like old rubber that has lost its resiliency. A few more dog walkers are out with the rising sun now, solitary figures walking slowly to no place in particular and in no particular hurry. Near the backstop for Field 5, hard by the basketball courts, there is a sudden bush with popcorn all over it. No, wait, not popcorn but berries, white berries, clustered like popped kernels at the tip of each branch. The fruit stands out like an avian advertisement against the flat browns and dull greens of winter--eat me, pass my seeds through you, spread my progeny across the land. Astonishing how it all works together when it goes right. As the sun climbs higher, diffusing the crispness of the sky, I turn onto Dunnell Road. There are suddenly many single fathers living on this street, the product of splintering families and the gravity of a mostly rental street in a town of mainly singly-family homes. It needs a new name--Custody Row? My run is almost over, now. Soon I will be leaving Maplewood, and I will find new places to marvel over on cold winter mornings. Maplewood will become one more dot on my personal atlas, a waystation to recall with the kids on long drives in the future, as in, hey Dad, do you remember the Trattoria? Or, how come they don't have a Scrivners here? Transitions. Life is a continuous stringing together of transitions. Try as we might to set up personal rituals and customs every step is just another one in another direction. Trite, I know, the thoughts of a suddenly self-aware teenager. But poignently real on reflective mornings like this. | ||
| sunseeker Citizen Username: Sunseeker Post Number: 80 Registered: 1-2004 |
Mark - have you thought of doing any writing - other than on MOL (lol)? You have a great, easy to read style. | ||
| Mark Fuhrman Citizen Username: Mfpark Post Number: 948 Registered: 9-2001 |
Thanks. You made my day. | ||
| emmie Citizen Username: Emmie Post Number: 377 Registered: 3-2002 |
Mark, I agree, you write beautifully and your vivid discriptions are so easy to visulize. Hope you continue to write here anyway. | ||
| Me2 Citizen Username: Me2 Post Number: 73 Registered: 6-2003 |
More please! | ||
| Mark Fuhrman Citizen Username: Mfpark Post Number: 993 Registered: 9-2001 |
On black winter nights like this, with a quarter moon waning and the stars crisp beyond the Milky Way, you walk with your ghosts. They are as real as the breath crystallizing in the air before you. You hear them in the flag clips banging against the metal pole in front of the Police Station, hollow and irregular, mournful and alone. I first found night cold like this in the north mountains after hard days of skiing with my dad, but I did not understand then, was too young to have real ghosts from the past. It was not until I was in college where the wind swept in over old, rounded hills, the suspicion of being alone echoed in the distance, made me start to listen. Tonight I am reminded of someone from that cold college town, just south of Syracuse in the poorest county in New York, a place where the Appalachians start and continue down south and where lake-effect snows squall from November to March. She is Evelyn, my Chinese Jewish Quaker grandmother. Well, not mine alone–she was mother and grandmother to hundreds of students over the years. And not really Jewish, although her husband, my teacher, was Jewish once before becoming a Quaker. But she was Chinese, from her hair pulled back into a tidy bun to her tiny feet that were bound by her parents just after the start of the last century. Though modern and an American for many decades, she bore about her a Chinese wisdom leavened with Quaker insight and a Buddhist temperament. I never really understood her, but she taught me more than any professor at Colgate. Evelyn passed away last year, and although I had not spoken with her in at least 6 years I was invited to her memorial, a Quaker meeting in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Yet, for all that she meant to me, I could not speak at her service. The words stopped in my throat and I was ashamed to have driven so far only to have not shared my memories at her service. But tonight, walking through the park past the silent trees, with the ice starting to skin on the skating rink, Evelyn came coursing back with the north wind. She was a small woman, smaller even than me, about four and a half feet, but she stood with great balance on the balls of her feet, toes pointed slightly out, back straight and head up so that she seemed taller and filled a room with her quiet presence. By the time I knew her, her face was wrinkled, thick blue veins stood out on her hands, and her voice would shake sometimes with weariness. When I hugged her she smelled old, of must and the slow dissolution of age. But her eyes were as sharp as the stars in the winter sky, pointed stabs of light dancing in a deep dark background, often in good humor and sometimes with flashes of righteous anger when she perceived an injustice. The house she shared with Ted was a living shrine to peacemakers and great thinkers of the 20th Century. Because of Ted’s peace activism through the years, they had become a way-station for visiting dignitaries from the 1950's on. The distinct etched calligraphy of visiting Zen masters hung on their walls near pictures of Ted and Evelyn with great leaders from Africa and Europe, and gifts from pacifists listed in the history books of America (especially the history books that are not read in most schools, which made them all the more mythic). And all were the beneficiaries of Evelyn’s amazing cooking–thousand year old eggs and tofu dinners and tamari-marinated chicken and her gentle insistence that you must eat more, you are looking too thin, it is not right for someone so young to not eat more (this was the Jewish side of her). But it was the story of her life, or at least the story as I heard it passed around, that was most amazing, although she would not tell it herself so I am not sure how much is apocryphal and what is true. Yet, it is the story as I choose to remember it, and it goes something like this: Evelyn was born in the highlands, above Shanghai, around 1910. Her father was a Methodist minister, very strict and very traditional. Her feet, so tiny even in old age, were bound by her parents when she was young–a lifelong symbol of her connection to ancient China, so appropriate as she stood with one foot in the past and the other in the modern present. If her feet hurt her later in life, she never let on to me. Evelyn was a headstrong girl, according to Ted, and when she was in her teens she fled the domination of her father’s house and went to Shanghai to teach English in a Quaker school. Back then, this was apostasy–to flee from her father’s home and to leave the Methodist faith–and I am fairly certain it caused a major break with her family. It certainly is reflected in the steely resolve I found in her as an old woman–woe to those who crossed her sense of duty and justice. Ted was a similar star-crossed young man, raised in a Jewish household outside of Philadelphia. In the 20's he attended Swarthmore, and then Columbia for grad school without a real sense of why. Mainly, he wanted to get as far away from his father as possible, and so when an opportunity to teach in China arose, he grabbed it, figuring that half-way around the world was about as far away as he could get. In China, Ted met Evelyn. I never saw her with her hair down, but she must have been a stunning beauty, what with her gorgeous eyes and staunch will. Ted fell in love with her, and she with him. Soon the Japanese invaded China to set up Manchukuo, and Ted joined the Chinese underground, working as a translator and code maker. As I hear it, he worked with Mao and the Communists, not trusting the Nationalists and being rather idealistic himself. He was arrested by the Japanese and held in a small house with other foreign nationals, where they were regularly tortured and Ted, being a very strong mind, ministered to his compatriots who did not fare as well as he. The story passed among Colgate students that Ted had poison in his belt buckle in case the torture became more than he could bear, but he never considered that an option. I never had the courage to ask if this was true, and I doubt he would have done more than smile inscrutably and shake his head noncommitally. At some point Ted was freed by the Chinese, and before he was whisked out of the country he ran back to Evelyn’s apartment, tied a string around her finger to get her ring size, and was smuggled out of China and back to the United States, where he joined the US war effort as a translator and intermediary to the Chinese underground. A while later, as the Japanese were being pushed off the mainland, Ted parachuted into China with the US Army and found Evelyn, placing the right-sized ring on her finger. Yet, after such a storybook beginning, the rest of her life was filled with both great joy and great sorrow. Landing in Utah to teach college in the early 1950's, Ted found his pacifist leanings and Chinese wife made him suspect as a communist. I can only imagine the coldness that greeted Evelyn at faculty dinners, in the grocery store each day. Ted was recruited to Colgate by geographers friendly to him, and he and Evelyn settled into a long and wonderful career there–pillars both in the college community and the Quaker community. They had two children, a son and a daughter. Their son committed suicide at the age of 17, and their daughter became a schizophrenic living on the streets of Seattle. When I taught with Ted one year I recall him getting a phone call that almost broke his resolve, and Mary, our secretary, later told me it was the daughter calling. Evelyn carried the deep sadness like old scar tissue, and her love for all of us clearly sprang from her awareness of the rare fragility of young minds. As the wind cut through the leafless trees tonight, I remembered Evelyn shaking her finger at me, scolding me, with one hand on her small hip, her voice rising high, still using Chinese-inflected English after all these years. “Why you stubborn all the time! You should be like willow in storm–bend, bend, bend but not break. Snap back and be ready for another day. You are too hard and you will break in the wind, and then what good will you be? You must be like tree with feet in two streams, be balanced, do not get washed away by flood in one stream.” As I look at these words on the screen they sound caricaturish, like a bad translation of the I Ching channeled through Kung Fu. But when Evelyn said these things they made sense, like a deep chord echoing in my heart. Yes, I laughed at her, as I laughed at most old people in those days. But I heard, Evelyn, I heard you and I miss you and I am sorry that I did not speak up when I had the chance. I am sure you would have known exactly what to say. | ||
| Dave Moderator Username: Dave Post Number: 4761 Registered: 4-1998  |
Very nice. Makes me want to dig up a lengthy letter a friend of our family wrote during the days of the Japanese invasion. Like Evelyn's father, he too was a Methodist minister. Hope I can find the letter. It's been a while since I last saw it. | ||
| Mark Fuhrman Citizen Username: Mfpark Post Number: 996 Registered: 9-2001 |
Hope you find it--sounds like a treasure. I once spent some time with a friend of theirs in Boston who was a Jewish refugee in Shanghai fleeing the Nazis. What at time! | ||
| Dave Moderator Username: Dave Post Number: 4765 Registered: 4-1998 |
If you haven't read it yet, you're in for a treat: The Soong Dynasty by Sterling Seagrave. You'll quickly learn why so many people preferred Mao to the Nationalists at that time and be incredibly entertained (and saddened) as well. I have a copy if you want to borrow it. details from Amazon | ||
| Debby Citizen Username: Debby Post Number: 1445 Registered: 5-2001 |
Mark - Wonderful stuff. I thought this article might interest you and Dave - it just appeared in yesterday's paper. I had known a little bit about Jews who escaped to Shanghai during WWII, but eveidently there was a sizeable and successful community there previously, as well. The war refugees got there overland - by rail and by foot through Lithuania, Russia, Siberia and Mongolia. Amazing stuff. If you look at the link, you'll see there are also two related articles in the same issue. http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/nationworld/sfl-oshanghaijewsdec19,0,1897612.st ory | ||
| Mark Fuhrman Citizen Username: Mfpark Post Number: 1003 Registered: 9-2001 |
Thanks so much, Debby. I hadn't known about it at all until I met this friend of Ted's in about 1995. An amazing story of escape and survival. | ||
| Mark Fuhrman Citizen Username: Mfpark Post Number: 1021 Registered: 9-2001 |
Today was a double whammy for me, trying to figure out what to do with myself when more than half the country is shut down. After 25 years in a mixed marriage, where I first celebrated Christmas with my ex's family every year, and later with our own children, I am once again Noel-less, a Jewish person alone on a Christian holiday with no family within 500 miles. The ex and kids are visiting her family, so it is just me and the dog to make some new traditions. Perhaps it is my newly liberated perspective on the world, seen now through the slant of solitude, but the town seemed emptier than most Christmas's. In fact, as I drove down Scotland Road to Montclair to see an afternoon showing of Kinsey, it felt like the set for The Omega Man, the cold wind blowing garbage through empty streets, with only a few people huddled in dark hooded overcoats, staggering along. The theater was late to open, and a line slowly formed in front of the ticket window. Everyone was Jewish in line, or so it seemed, stereotypically so in some cases, presumed by circumstances in others (I hardly look Jewish, so perhaps I made the others wonder). Except for a young black couple at the head of the line. He wore an oversized blue jacket, faded blue baseball cap, and had a sweet, clear face. She wore a new white winter waist coat, her hair braided with colorful beads at the end. He gently touched her cheek and looked in her eyes as they spoke--she twinkled back at him. I was the only solitary person in line, and so was able to enjoy the pigeons pinwheeling in the crisp blue sky over the rust red brick facade of the old building. The line got testy as the ticket window remained closed and people began hopping around in the cold. Expecting to be in a warm theater, we were all underdressed for the wait. Finally, the window opened. At the front of the line, the man's voice rang clear, carried easily in the cold and expectant air while we all focused on the now open window. "Two for Ray." The whole line knew what he did not, that Kinsey was the only moving playing at 4:05, and Ray was not showing until 6:15. It was right there for him to read on the ticket marquee the whole time, but he failed to look up from his girlfriend's face. The line was quiet, hesitating, cold and impatient, and I wondered what would happen next. Suddenly, from behind me, a woman called out, "Kinsey is the only movie showing now." The man looked confused, turned to his girlfriend wanting her to make a decision, but she clearly had not heard of the movie. Ray they knew about, Kinsey was not in their lexicon. I was uncomfortably aware of the difference in age and in race between this young couple and the rest of the line. "What's it about?" he asked, half to the ticket window. "It's supposed to be good, got good reviews," someone else called out, encouragingly. The man hesitated. "It's about a guy who studies sex, lots of sex in it." Both the guy and the girlfriend visibly relaxed, their shoulders sat back, and laughing, he said, "That sounds good" and bought the tickets. The rest of the line cracked up. And so I again experienced the communal spirit of Christmas on this otherwise solitary day. I hope they enjoyed the movie as much as I did. | ||
| Eats Shoots & Leaves Citizen Username: Mfpark Post Number: 3632 Registered: 9-2001 |
The View Outside My Window September 11, 2001 Concrete, glass, and steel spark the September sky Crystal blue, like a newborn’s eyes Before their color deepens with ruminations of life. Eyes that now see masticated desks and chairs, monitors, returns, Travertine and granite, lamps and ornate fixtures, Cooling towers and chillers and high voltage transformers, And stairs, elevators, hands heads torsos transformed Into gray-flecked clouds ballooning into the September sky. Softening girders stand with bowed heads, feet fixed In the granite bedrock below, shorn of even glassine eyes To spy upon the dusts of days that will not return, Nor cast shadows through the refractions of life. It is easy to inhale that acrid cloud, inspire rejections of life, Allow the dust to cake our lungs until, transformed, We become like those who will not return, Who drift without purpose in the crisp September sky, Mixing with the ozone and soot and sweet salt air. I Search hungrily for meaning for my hands, something to fix, I wrap myself in old newspapers, inhaling impure facts, Seeking a reflection of concrete, steel and glass in this life. Banish the beauty of cascading glass before my eyes, The diamondized sparkle of curtain walls swiftly transformed Into liquefied silicate and paper streamers in the sky, Buckling my knees with its enormity. Return Me to the time before strangers would return Smiling eyes on the street, when they fixed their Baleful City stares straight above your head, noses to the skies, Walking in this town where numbered streets measure lives, A time before we were all familiars, graceless performers, Embarrassed, seeking solace in the random dance of eyes. Concrete, glass, and steel, drifting molecules, I Think of how they will mix with rain, fall to earth, return To the clouds again, hydrostats attracting tears, transformed Into a new cycle of undying, an endless fixture Fitting seamlessly into the rhythms of our lives, Floating around the world, a community of the skies. Memories adrift in the sky, the color of a newborn’s eyes, Deepen my reflections of life that my peace may return, Shine like a fixture in my mind, may I one day be transformed. © September 11, 2001 Mark A. Furman |
