Baltic Place

Our Daily Bread

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By Ed Staskus

   My mother started working at Pick-N-Pay when my sister was 7 years old and had reached the age of reason. It was 1964. My brother and I were a few years older than our sister, but listening to my mother anybody would have thought we were still trying to catch up to her in smarts. We told our mother we knew our way around.

   She was mending a skirt. She put her needle down and said, “Boys, the young know everything, the middle-aged are suspicious of everything, and the old believe everything. I’m not young but I’m not old, either. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

   “Come on mom, we’re not stupid.”

   “Good,” she said.

   The next day we found out what she was saying when we asked an older student at school what she was saying.

   “What she’s trying to tell you is, she suspects everything, especially you two,” he said, walking away and shaking his head.

   “Oh, right, that’s what we thought,” my brother improvised. 

   We were living in a two-family house in the St. Clair-Superior neighborhood. The house had been built in 1903. There were tornado doors leading into the basement from the backyard and an out-of-date coal room. The anthracite chute had been bolted shut. There was a sweet gum tree in the backyard. It was where we played William Tell with rubber arrows. We attended St. George’s Catholic School, taking two city buses there in the morning and two city buses back home in the afternoon.

   “Every day Vytas drove to work and the kids went to school,” my mother said. “I was left all alone. Most of my friends worked, helping provide, but Vytas said under no circumstances did he want me to go to work outside of the house. We didn’t agree about that. One day after I learned how to drive I thought I would try to find a job in a bank. I looked in the newspaper. There was an ad for a new bank opening on Noble Rd. in Cleveland Hts. Vytas didn’t know I was going, but I went.”

   By that time we had moved to North Collinwood and were living east of E. 185th St. The bank’s main office was on Rockside Rd., 25 miles away. She had yet to drive five miles in any one direction. It took her an hour to get there. She didn’t get the job, but there were Pick-N-Pay offices in a building next door. She saw a sign saying they were hiring cashiers for a new store on the same Noble Rd. as the bank.

   Pick-N-Pay got started in the 1920s when Ed Silverberg opened a dairy store in Cleveland Hts. During the Great Depression he surprisingly expanded and called his new stores Farmview Creamery. He changed the name to Pick-N-Pay in 1940 and by 1951 they had grown to 10 locations. When my mother went to work for the supermarket chain there were more than 40 locations.

   “There were maybe 50 people filling out applications. They asked me if I played the piano. No, I said. They asked me if I knew how to type. No, I said.”

    The interviewer looked up from his desk. “He asked me if there was anything at all that recommended me. I told him I worked nights with a relative, an immigrant like us, who was an accountant. He moonlighted doing the books for more than a dozen women who staged Tupperware home parties.”

   The sales parties took place in living rooms. Tupperware was a plastic storage container invented by Earl Tupper. They were going like gangbusters. Our next-door neighbor Arlene Noga had a full set. She put leftovers in them instead of throwing the food away. Only after she forgot about the leftovers and they finally spoiled in the containers did she throw the food away. 

   “I am very good on adding machines is what I said to the man interviewing me.”

   Four women were hired that day. My mother was one of them. She started her new job on Noble Rd. two weeks later.

   “When I got home it was late. Vytas had made supper. As soon as I walked in the door he wanted to know where I had been. I hadn’t left a note. When I told him I had gotten a job he was unhappy.”

   “Who’s going to take care of the kids?” he asked.

   “They’re old enough to take care of themselves,” she said.

    It wasn’t exactly true but our father didn’t know that. He had a full time and a part-time job on top of that. We hardly saw him Monday through Friday. On weekends he told us what we must do and must not do. We didn’t have to deserve our mother’s love. We had to deserve our father’s.

   “My first day on the job, after my training, the head cashier showed me around the store. ‘Do your best,’ she told me. ‘You’ll never be as good as me but do your best.’  Everything had to be rung up one at a time. If there was a sale, like seven for a dollar, I had to do the division. Very soon, I didn’t have to look at the keys on the register, just push the groceries with one hand while my other hand rang them up while I talked to the customer. I got to be as good as the head cashier. Even she said so.”

   Starting in the 1970s, after cashiers rang up orders, they gave customers S & H Green Stamps based on their total purchase. It was a loyalty program. Shoppers pasted the stamps into booklets and redeemed them for ash trays, bicycles, and appliances. “We had boxes on the floor next to us where we kept the booklets and rolls of stamps. I didn’t like the boxes because there wasn’t much room to move around in the first place, what with all the circulars down there.”

   One day my father was complaining about the competitive spirit in the land. “It’s dead in America,” he said. 

   “If you believe it’s dead,” my mother said, “you’ve never been in my grocery store when a cashier opens another check-out line.”

   My mother had a falling out with the manager at the Noble Rd. store. “I told him I needed time off every summer. We took the kids to a Lithuanian summer camp on the Georgian Bay north of Toronto. My husband and I were volunteers and stayed the whole two weeks. He said OK but when summer came he wouldn’t let me go. I said, I’m going, no matter what you say. He said no, again, although I didn’t listen. He had no choice, because I went, but he punished me. I worked eight-hour days three days a week, but never on Saturdays. He made me work on Saturdays, at least until he was fired. He got the ax when they found out he was stealing steaks.”

   Her intention was to work 20-some years and retire with a good pension. “It wasn’t hard work. I enjoyed it. We had to bag the groceries but on weekends we had kids bagging. I didn’t lift anything heavy. I just pushed it.” I spent a summer while in high school bagging at a Pick-N-Pay store on E. 72nd St. and St. Clair Ave. I did more heavy lifting than I expected. A gallon of anything weighs eight pounds. Hundreds of gallons a day weigh thousands of pounds a day.

   “Sometimes customers would help. Old people were always coming into my check-out line. I tried to remember their names and we talked because they often didn’t have anybody else to talk to. One lady believed in ancient aliens while another one liked describing the butterflies in her backyard. They had long faces whenever they saw me working the express line.”

   After we moved out of North Collinwood and were living in Euclid on the Lake Erie side of Lakeshore Blvd. she asked the new manager to be transferred. Pick-N-Pay had opened a new store within walking distance and my mother wanted to work there. “The manager was a good man, but because I was good worker he didn’t want to let me go. One day the guy who hired me was at the store, bagging groceries for the cashiers. He was married to the daughter of the man who owned the stores. He often went to them unannounced and got his hands dirty. I asked him if I could go to the new store. I lied and said I didn’t have a car. He said, ‘Wait until tomorrow.’ The next day he stopped in and said, ‘Monday, go to the new store.’”

   She walked home for lunch every day. One day before lunch she went into the basement to throw some clothes in the washer and discovered the basement was flooded. “Vytas didn’t know how to do anything around the house but I called him anyway. He didn’t know where the main shut-off was. I ran back to the store and told the manager. He ran back to our house with me and turned the water right off. He knew everything.”

   When my parents moved to Sagamore Hills she again had to ask for a transfer. The manager said, “No problem.” He threw a staff party for my mother. “He brought his wife and their triplets. He was a hands-on man but having triplets was no walk in the park. He said, ‘It’s a whole lot of love, a whole lot of diapers, and a whole lot of who’s crying now. It’s three times the blessings but three times the chaos, too.’”

   She went to work at the Pick-N-Pay store on Emery Rd. “The head cashier, Katie, and I became best friends. Her husband and she liked music shows. We often went to the Carousel Dinner Theater together.”

   The Carousel was in Ravenna a half hour away. It had opened in 1973 with Arte Johnson, a cast member of “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” starring in Neil Simon’s “Last of the Red Hot Lovers.” Arte Johnson called the show “ver-r-r-ry in-te-res-ting.” Performances ran Tuesday through Sunday at the 500-seat complex. Tickets ranged from $6.95 on weekdays to $10.95 on Friday and Saturday nights. The tickets were for dinner and a play. Entrees included roast beef, chicken almondine, ham steak, and seafood casserole. Seconds and thirds were included. My parents ate light to save room the day of the show. My mother never made breakfast the next day.

   Dave Fulford, the founder and manager of the Carousel, favored light comedies. He didn’t care for the “snob hits” of New York City, saying they were “so intellectual they go beyond entertainment. I don’t think dinner theater audiences want to work. They don’t want an algebra test after dinner.”

   My parents and their friends went to the last show in Ravenna in 1988 before the Carousel moved to Akron. The show was “Big Bad Burlesque.” It was an off-Broadway revue, a musical salute to the golden days of burlesque. The show was made up of skits and girls, lots of girls. The skits were based on one joke, which was unsatiated and unrequited lust. My father had trouble keeping his eyes on his dinner plate.

   “By today’s standards, burlesque is the only family show left in town,” Katie’s husband grumbled.

   After the show my mother told her friend she was retiring from Pick-N-Pay. “She tried to talk me out of it, but I had worked long enough. My husband had moved up at TRW and I wanted to start volunteering, especially at our church.”

   My mother worked three days a week every week her 24 years at the supermarket chain. What she didn’t know was that the trouble with retirement is you never get a day off. Her church sold frozen Lithuanian dumplings every Sunday to raise money, just like they hosted bingo on Friday nights. She worked the bingo games and twice a week made dumplings with six or seven other women. After mass she worked in the community hall selling them. After they were all sold she helped clean up. She worked at all the church’s special events.

   One evening while visiting my parents I observed that she was working more in her retirement than she had when she was a working woman.

   “I retire when I go to bed,” she said.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Help support these stories. $25 a year (7 cents a day). Contact edwardstaskus@gmail.com with “Contribution” in the subject line. Payments processed by Stripe.

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn, New York City, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Chasing Infinity

On the Warpath

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By Ed Staskus

   Bernard Shaw was on a roll in the Roaring Twenties. For over a decade he had been scoring  theatrical winners, spirited satires of the times, breezy comedies revolving around artificial circumstance, and melodramas based on marriage and family life. When he switched gears it was with “Heartbreak House” in 1920. It was produced in New York City and was well-received.  The theme of the play dealt with the ethics of humanism and scientific determinism at loggerheads with each other. It marked a return of a sense of high purpose in the playwright’s work. 

   It met with less success in London a year later.  “It was partly because of miscasting, but chiefly because the London audience was a failure,” Bernard Shaw said with a splash of venom. He was always ready to speak his mind. “The secret of success is to offend the greatest number of people,” he said.

   “Back to Methuselah” hit the stage in 1921. An elaborate speculative fantasy, it met with critical acclaim and public listlessness when performed in the United States, which had until then taken Bernard Shaw to its bosom and heaped honors on him in a form everybody understood, namely dollars and cents.

   For all of his success as a writer, there were a few cracks in Bernard Shaw’s happiness. He was closing in on his threescore and ten. “Threescore-and-ten’s the mark, and no man with a conscience, and a proper sense of what’s expected of him, has any business to live longer, flying in the face of the Bible,” Charles Dickens wrote. Even though he eventually exceeded the Biblical edict, he knew the remarkable energy of his so far long lifetime was waning. The death of his older sister served as a reminder that even he would one day pass away.

   Although “Back to Methuselah” was a good play, there were some critics, like Homer Woodbridge, who believed “as a playwright he has shot his bolt, and that as a preacher he is getting very tiresome.” Even though Bernard Shaw was capable of great disdain, he was still irked by the criticism. He wanted to write another play right away, but had trouble getting started. “Sometimes the urge to write comes over me and I cannot think what to write about,” he said. “This happened before I started ‘Saint Joan.’ I wanted to get to work on something but I hadn’t a subject. ‘Why not write a play on Joan of Arc?’ said my wife. So, I did.”

   “Saint Joan” was written in 1923 and produced in 1924. It was a success in both New York City and London. It stilled his most obstinate detractors. The play incorporated two themes Bernard Shaw was interested in, which were history and religion.  (Two earlier plays, “Androcles and the Lion” and “The Devil’s Disciple,” had focused on those same concerns.) Essentially a tragedy concerned with a universal issue, namely the conflicts that arise between individuals and the institutions they erect, “Saint Joan” has come to be considered Bernard Shaw’s “last great hurrah.”

   Many critics approach the play as one of Bernard Shaw’s best efforts, comparable in importance and popularity to “Man and Superman.” The Oxford History of English Literature has called it his outstanding work, “conceivably the finest and most moving English drama since ‘The Winter’s Tale’ or ‘The Tempest.’ It owns that sure mark of greatness, a stature that remains intact after every consideration has been given to its evident and undeniable imperfections.”

   In 1910, long before the appearance of “Saint Joan,” G. K. Chesterton published a biography of Bernard Shaw, even though he had said, “It is indefensibly foolish to attempt to explain a man whose whole object through life has been to explain himself.” After it was published the playwright said, “It is the best work of literary art I have yet provoked. It is a fascinating portrait study and is in the great tradition of literary portraiture.”

   G. K. Chesterton and Bernard Shaw had been good friends for many years. They enjoyed debating one another about the world’s problems. The biography begins with a preface that outlines the headaches of preparing a preface for a book about the ‘Master of Prefaces,’ which Bernard Shaw was. The book itself is divided into six parts. The first three parts, “The Irishman,” “The Puritan,” and “The Progressive” describe the soil out of which Bernard Shaw sprang. The last three parts, “The Critic,” “The Dramatist,” and “The Philosopher” delineate the playwright’s activities with and relationship to the stage up to about 1909.

   My purpose is to examine the parts of the biography and see to what extent G. K. Chesterton’s observations about Bernard Shaw anticipate the creation of “Saint Joan.” The question I hope to answer is whether or not Bernard Shaw was in a sense ordained to write the play, or something very like it. I don’t think the playwright would scoff at my proposal that there was something miraculous going on.  He once said it was funny being asked why he denied miracles “because I never do deny them, but, on the contrary, spend my life largely affirming them. The world is full of miracles.”

   Bernard Shaw was an Irishman. A connection between his ancestry and Joan of Arc can be made in this way: the maid was a virgin and in the 15th century was considered to be a saint, which she became in actuality 500 years later.  Bernard Shaw came from a land variously known as “The Land of Virgins” and “The Land of Saints.” G. K. Chesterton writes that in some other time, in another kind of civilization, Bernard Shaw might have been regarded as a saint, albeit an ascetic and negative one. He embellished the image by marking a strange note in Bernard Shaw, which is “that he is literally unworldly. Worldliness has no human magic for him; he is not bewitched by rank nor drawn on by conviviality at all.” 

   There is a clear relationship between Bernard Shaw and Joan of Arc. She is “unworldly” to the extent of communicating with spirits and with God himself. In the preface to “Saint Joan” the storyteller writes that this trick of the imagination visits many of those burdened with genius, which he considers Joan of Arc to be.

   Bernard Shaw was not unaware of his own genius. In 1924 he concluded that “if Paris perishes in ignorance of my works, the loss will be for Paris and not for me. I do not say that the loss would not be serious; for I am as indispensable as Bergson for a complete modern culture.” He may not have heard voices, but he could appreciate the reason Joan of Arc did. 

   Like Bernard Shaw, Joan of Arc is not attracted by the trappings of rank .She does not aspire to generalship in the usual sense. Throughout the play she remains aware of her origins and breeding. Conviviality does not strike a chord in her. If it had she would not have alienated almost all of her compatriots. But if she had not she could not have been heroic, since her heroism depends on willfulness and stubbornness, which are antithetical to conviviality. As it happens, her heroic virtues are given free rein.

   According to G. K. Chesterton, there are several modal elements that can be ascribed to the Irish. He believes Irishmen succeed in those labors that “require a certain crystalline realism; such professions are the lawyer and the soldier.” Joan of Arc becomes a soldier and argues her own case like a lawyer before the Inquisition. The Irishman is “aggressive, and he attacks, he goes on asking for a thing because he wants it, and he tries really to hurt his enemies because they are his enemies.” Joan of Arc’s arrival on the front signals the beginning of an implacable campaign to oust the English from France and, in the process, to crown the Dauphin king, which she alone seems to want.  

   The Irish mentality embraces a kind of peculiar and “wild chastity” in regards to sex. Joan of Arc is a peasant girl who is able to remain chaste amid a mob of soldiers, whose sexual desires were often held in abeyance for lengthy periods with great difficulty. She wears armor for more reasons than one.

   The last general truth G. K. Chesterton asserts is that “Ireland is a country in which the political conflicts are at least genuine; they are about something.” He goes on to say that they are real because they hinge on the “ three great realities” of patriotism, religion, and hard cash. “Saint Joan” has nothing to do with money, but everything to do with the other two realities. Without being actually cognizant of the issues, Joan of Arc nevertheless promotes nationalism at the cost of the nobles, and undermines the Catholic Church’s contention that one can apprehend God only with the assistance of an assigned intermediary. If political contests are contests for power, “Saint Joan” is unquestionably a story of such a struggle.

   Besides being an Irishman, which endowed him with a kind of “intellectual chastity and the fighting spirit,” Bernard Shaw was an Orangeman. He was a Protestant in a Roman Catholic land. There were many Nationalist Irishmen who condemned him as a “West Briton.” Bernard Shaw was “an exile from Ireland living in Ireland,” much as Joan of Arc was an outsider to the land and church she fought for.

   The kind of Protestant that Bernard Shaw was amounted to  Puritanism. G. K. Chesterton defines the basic tenet of Puritanism in this way: “It is a refusal to contemplate God or goodness with anything lighter or milder than the most fierce concentration of the intellect.” Bernard Shaw wrote in 1912 that if he could “conceive a God as deliberately creating something less than himself, I should class him as a cad. If he were simply satisfied with himself, I should class him as a coxcomb. My God must continually strive to surpass himself.” Just like God must reaffirm and surpass himself so must a Puritan in service to his God.

   This touches on Joan of Arc in two ways. First, she eschews, however unwittingly, dealing with her God except on the most immediate basis. She brings all of herself to it. Second, she reaffirms her stance, though in a roundabout way, during and at the conclusion of her trial. Her faith wavers momentarily, but her fierceness wins out in the end. She unequivocally returns to the essential and demanding Puritan idea that “God can only be praised by direct contemplation of him.”  

   G. K. Chesterton maintains that, because he is a Puritan, Bernard Shaw is never frivolous. The same can be said for Joan of Arc. She does not make war wearing a ball gown. While talking to the artist Walter Tittle in 1924 George Shaw said Joan of Arc’s idea “in wearing man’s clothes was a sensible one; she was a soldier, and could not be bothered with skirts, and as she was associated with soldiers constantly it was more modest to dress as one of them.” But this was one of the counts against her at the trial, and was interpreted by the Catholic Church as wanton immodesty. Joan of Arc never uses her wit for fun  – so much like Bernard Shaw’s, in that it is not a sense of humor, which implies that truth is tricky. She rather uses it as one of the means to attain her goals. She joshes the Dauphin to give him courage. When she pokes fun at religious leaders it is because she understands they are her enemies. She uses her wit like a weapon. It is, like a Calvinist’s and like Bernard Shaw’s, consistent as a sharp tongue eager to engage.

   An aspect of all Puritans is that they are austere. Bernard Shaw’s Puritan teachers “could not prevent him from taking up theatricals, but they made him take theatricals seriously .” Joan of Arc is similarly austere. During her trial she declares that she could comfortably live on bread and water. Her aversion to excess is signaled by her reaction to everlasting imprisonment as punishment for her heresy. Her recantation is recanted. She instinctively recoils from that judgment because it would deny her the lifeforce of nature, and also because she believes the verdict is wildly extravagant. Death   has preference because it pales in the face of profligacy.

   He austerity in the play is occasionally belied by some historical inaccuracies. The critic J. Van Kan has observed that Joan of Arc would sooner have endured diabolical cruelties at the hands of her torturers than to admit a naturalistic explanation for her “voices.” On the whole, though, considering her sincerity, background, and mission, and the means she employs to fulfill her destiny, she is an austere character. Bernard Shaw answered for his errors of strict fact when he wrote to a critic of his representation of Joan of Arc’s nature that he had “ no theory about Joan, and understand her no more than I understand myself.”

   If Bernard Shaw’s vocation was as a playwright, then his avocation was as a progressive. G. K Chesterton writes that he was born in an epoch that had taken the great political and moral successes of the 19th century and fashioned them into portals of nothing. “The moral world was pretty well all windows and no house by the time George Bernard Shaw arrived on the scene.” The reason it was mostly windows by the time he got to London was that morality had morphed into mud. Bernard Shaw waded into the mudflat and “thoroughly trashed all competitors in the difficult art of being at the same time modern and intelligent.” He kept revolutionists on their toes by such declarations as that physical science was a mystical fake. He didn’t go into details and left it at that.

   As a progressive Bernard Shaw concentrated on two crusades. The first was the humanitarian cause. “At its best and noblest it meant a sort of mystical identification of our life with the whole life of nature,” G. K. Chesterton says, though he does not mention what it is at its worst. Joan of Arc’s identification with a similar cause can be shown by two examples. First, although she went to war, it was specifically to save her homeland. On the battlefield she did not actually kill anyone. Second, she prefers the stake to exile from nature.

   Another cause Bernard Shaw committed himself to was Socialism. G. K. Chesterton says that this exemplifies the same trait as his humanitarianism. If it does, then Joan of Arc leaving the farming life of her parents to live among a gaggle of soldiers is a reflection of her sociological leanings and human compassion

   G. K Chesterton admires Bernard Shaw’s moral and social persuasions, but says thst his “great defect was and is the lack of democratic sentiment.” This particular lack is exactly what sends Joan of Arc on the warpath and to her death. She fails to see that her trial is political, not religious. In addition, she is unable or unwilling to delegate authority, and consequently comes to be considered arrogant and disagreeable. She and her spirit  oracles cannot make a mistake. He body will fail Joan of Arc. She may not be a democrat, but, like Bernard Shaw, she makes an excellent republican. Her death will be a success. The two of them “are more for the Public Thing than the Private Thing.”

   I have emphasized the first three parts of G. K. Chesterton’s biography because they have the most to reveal about Bernard Shaw’s nature and character, and by inference Joan of Arc herself. The last three parts say less about who Bernard Shaw was and more about what he did up to 1910, which was that he wrote a few lackadaisical novels and a good many good  plays. Each of these imaginings had a plot and a theme. Some of the attitudes expressed in the plays and other writings can be brought to bear on “Saint Joan.” 

   When Bernard Shaw was a critic for the Saturday Review he defended the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. He informed everyone that Ibsen “was not artistic, but moral; that his dramas were didactic and that all great art was didactic.” Bernard Shaw might as well have been talking about himself.. He went to great lengths to make his plays didactic. The original version of “Back to Methuselah” took three days to perform. If one was willing to stay and listen, one couldn’t help but get the point. Many of his plays sport prefaces and epilogues intended to make the meaning clear as a bell. With “Saint Joan” Bernard Shaw was doing what Socrates believed to be the highest duty of a teacher, which was exposing prejudices and misconceptions in order to arrive at the truth.

   In Plato’s “The Last Days of Socrates” the doomed philosopher invents a persona for “The Laws and Constitution of Athens” in order to find out whether or not he should flee the sentence of death that hangs over him. It is worthwhile pointing out that Bernard Shaw likewise creates spokesmen for the political and religious adventures of the time, and then posits Joan of Arc against them. The dialogues that ensue set forth the relative positions of all involved and then, in the epilogue, synthesize those positions. This is done subtly enough so that Bernard Shaw’s conception of the truth is set forth forthrightly, and yet space is left for the audience to come to their own conclusions. In this vein the critic F. F. Rattray said that “it is a tribute to Shaw that both Catholics and Protestants have been satisfied with how their respective cases have been dealt with in it.”

   G. K. Chesterton writes that in “Arms and the Man” there was, among other elements of style, “one thing not unimportant; there was savage sincerity.” In the future, out of the remote past, Joan of Arc lay in wait. A warrior of ferocious sincerity, she seems an apt character for Bernard Shaw’s pen. She fits right into his style.

   Idealism is not the same as sincerity. Bernard Shaw published “The Philanderer” in 1898 as part of “Plays Unpleasant.” It was in part an exposition of the ”dangers of ideals, the sacrifice of people to principles.” It strongly suggested that “ the idealist is more concerned about the sin than the sinner.” Bernard Shaw went on to recapitulate this idea in “Saint Joan.” He used the Catholic Church to demonstrate the inhumanity of doggedly adhering to a single creed. That might be their only crime. They harm not only others, but eventually themselves, as well. They disregard the fact that happiness is a practical, not an abstract concern.

   One of Bernard Shaw’s most important plays, and the last one I will talk about in relation to “Saint Joan,” is “Man and Superman.” The play mixes many themes but one stands out, which is his discovery of Frederick Nietzsche and the concept of the Superman. Frederick Nietzsche believed that just as man had evolved from primates, leaving them behind on the evolutionary ladder, man would ultimately give rise to a new breed of man, higher than Homo Sapiens as he is higher than the apes. In Frederick Nietzsche’s mind this eventually became interwoven with anachronistic ideas about valor and a hatred of pity. Bernard Shaw was not taken in by these latter beliefs, for, as G. K. Chesterton says, “It would require more than ten thousand mad Polish professors to make Bernard Shaw anything but a generous and compassionate man.” 

   Bernard Shaw came to believe that man’s only hope was in evolution. Consequently, he made the hero of “Man and Superman” a woman, whose justification in seeking a mate suitable for producing a better race is that she will be the mother of the coming Superman. One of the ideas buttressing the play is that nature desires ideal marriages.

   Insomuch as it must be a woman who produces the Superman, it may be that Bernard Shaw envisioned Joan of Arc as a precursor to the woman who would do it. One of Joan of Arc’s achievements is that she promotes a redefinition of the role of women in society. Her other achievement is that she is an example of how evolution is thought to work, which is along the lines of sudden changes or mutations. The tragedy of Joan of Arc is that she appeared to soon, too fast, and too insistent in the 15th century.   An unlikely  pioneer, she was crucified in the name of conventional morality. Her gifts and genius doomed her, as the old customs and obligations proved too strong. But she signals a new set of virtues and indicates that the time will come. It is inevitable, even though she raises the cry “How long, how long?” to her God.

   Posing the question of whether Bernard Shaw was fated to write “Saint Joan” reveals the answer to be “Who knows?” There is some evidence suggesting the seed of the play was in him, but the evidence must remain circumstantial. Nobody knows enough about the secret workings of fate to make assertions about its nature. Everybody knows enough about it to  connect some of the dots. We are not prisoners of fate, even though some people meet their destiny on the road they take to avoid it.  Rather, for good or ill, we are prisoners of our own minds.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Coney Island and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, scares up the shadows.

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A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Dancing With the Stars

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By Ed Staskus

   Folk dancing costumes are by and large traditional, except when they aren’t. When Gabriele Baltrunaite traveled from Cleveland, Ohio to the 2024 Centenary Song and Dance Celebration in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, she had to borrow one, even though she had one. “I had to borrow a dancing costume because, although I had one, but it was too Lithuanian,” she said. “They wanted us to wear our own versions for the festival.”

   “It is important for us that every participating ensemble bring their own tradition, their own songs, those they inherited from their own place, their own dances and customs,” said Vida Šatkauskienė of the Folklore Day creative group. “And all that diversity, every region, every ensemble, every individual performer, are what makes up our day.”

   The day lasted a week through the first week of July. It featured Folklore Day, Dance Day, Ensembles Evening, and Song Day. More than 9,000 dancers performed on Dance Day. Gabriele went with the Cleveland folk dance group Svyturys.   

  The dance group was established in 2003, when 16 young dancers got together to prepare for the XII Lithuanian Folk Dance Festival in Chicago. They perform at shows, festivals, and special events. They have appeared throughout the United States and Europe, as well as South America. They have organized  “Concerts of Friendship”  to which dancers from the Lithuanian diaspora are invited to participate.

   “I started dancing at St. Casimir’s when I was in 2nd grade,” Gabriele said. “In the 8th grade I started dancing with Svyturys.” She has danced with the group since she was 13 years old, participating in many of its overseas excursions. “Sweden was my favorite trip,” she said. It’s hard to beat a breath of fresh Scandinavian air. In between breathing there is fika, the coffee break ritual of the Swedes.

   “Dancing is fun and I like the exercise, although sometimes it can suck practicing every Sunday.” The group practices Sundays from 10:30 to 1:30 at the Kirtland Community Center on the east side of Cleveland. “It’s partner dancing in a group. It’s highly choreographed, with lots of circles, polkas, and spinning. I like the social aspect of being in the group, making friends and making deeper connections. When it’s getting close to a concert, we have boot camp and practice even more. I love dancing at concerts, the forms and shapes we make on the dance floor, and the attention, the fact that people are looking at me.”

   Gabriele was born in Lithuania but grew up in the United States. In 1999 when she was three years old her parents Ausra and Gintaras tried their luck at the Green Card Lottery, a result of the Immigration Act of 1990. The new law allowed hundreds of thousands of immigrants to enter the United States. Lithuania was one of thirty one qualifying countries. Their luck was good. They were awarded visas. More immigrants were admitted into the United States from 1991 to 2000 than in any prior decade in American history, with11 million documented entries.

   “My parents were doing all right, but the economy was bad,” Gabriele said. “They wanted more success in life. They wanted a change of pace, something new, even though all they knew about the United States was what they had seen on TV.”

   Gabriele attended Eastlake North High School, Lakeland Community College, and graduated with a degree in Business Economics from Cleveland State University. She is a real estate agent with EXP Realty and operates her own commercial cleaning service with several employees. “I live by my phone,” she said.

   The 2024 Centenary Song and Dance Celebration was one hundred years in the making. The first Song Day was staged in Kaunas in 1924 and continued to be staged all through the Soviet Occupation after World War Two. It became a World Celebration after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and in 1994 more than 1,200 singers, dancers, and musicians from ten countries participated in the event

   This year’s event described itself as, “We, the singing and dancing people, make the living tradition that has survived through this century. We are the unique kin that meets every few years and speaks its own language. The language of this kin resembles the language of the earth – the language of the bird and the river, the culture and the memory, for our language is the one of life, spoken by all the members of the Cantor Lituanus kinship.”

   Flying from Cleveland to Helsinki to Vilnius takes about a full day and night with layovers. It takes a couple of days to get over the jet lag. The Svyturys group numbered more than forty on the plane, from dancers to teachers to volunteer support. They got to Lithuania a week before the big show. They stayed in the Old Town of Vilnius, brought back to life after the country recovered its independence in 1991. Nearly $30 million euros have been spent on restoration projects. Everybody got a complimentary bus pass with which to explore the city, of which there is much to explore. There are the Gates of Dawn, the Palace of the Grand Dukes, and the notorious Soviet-era Lukiskes Prison, which has morphed into a go-to for hundreds of artists and musicians who have set up their studios in renovated spaces there. Kankles are mightier than the sword.

   On Friday, the day after they arrived,  the group boarded a chartered bus and went to Palanga for the weekend to lay their jet lag out in the sun. Palanga is a resort town in western Lithuania on the shore of the Baltic Sea. In the height of summer, the sun comes up at 5 AM and doesn’t set until after 10 PM. “It doesn’t get totally dark until 11,” Gabriele said. It is the country’s largest seasonal resort, sporting beaches 11 miles long and 1,000 feet wide, with sand dunes to boot.

   Lithuania was the last European country to give up paganism and adopt Catholic Christianity. There used to be a pagan shrine at the base of a hill in Palanga watched over by a beautiful priestess by the name of Birute. She tended the ceremonial fire. One day Kestutis, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, laid eyes on her and decided he had to have her, even though she had promised the sky god Perkunas to remain a virgin as long as she lived. Kestutis wasn’t going to be denied, however, and took her back to Trakai, his fortress home. There was a lavish wedding, but the joy didn’t last long. Kestutis was murdered soon after and buried with his weapons and horses. Once free, Birute went back to Palanga, resumed her duties at the shrine, and when she died was buried at the top of the hill, as close to the stars as she could get.

   When the group got back to Vilnius from Palanga on Sunday they had a free night and the next day visited Seimas Palace, which is where the Parliament of the Republic of Lithuania meets. After that they had the rest of the day to themselves. Everybody tried to hit the hay early, although with little success, there being too much to do and see. 

   Each and every one of them knew that the next day the hard work was going to begin. The hard work coming up was going to be three straight days of practice. “Our practices were at a nearby park deep in the woods,” Gabriele said. “It was an athletic complex with fields, food trucks, and port-a-potties. Our practices were on one of two fields depending on the choreography. One part of one of the fields was super dusty. We had to run the field while dust kicked up, for two hours, running back and forth. When I got done my nose was full of dark boogers. It was tough.”

   What was tougher was the eagle-eyed man on the platform calling out instructions. “He was on a platform maybe 30 feet up, with a microphone and loudspeakers,” Gabriele said. “He had written the part of the concert we were going to perform. He had a  PhD in folk dancing.” There wasn’t going to be any easy way of explaining away missteps. “He knew every group’s assigned number.”

   As the first and second 12-hour days of practice unfolded Gabriele heard less of “Number 37, you’re doing it wrong.” Her group was Number 37. Nobody wanted to be the group whose number was being repeatedly called out. Svyturys kept their eyes open and their feet moving.

   “During one dance, which is actually technically easy, but it’s hard to remember, it’s always changing from a circle to a square to a diamond, he had to keep calling out and reminding us of the order,” Gabriele said. “But one group couldn’t get it right, no matter what.”  

   “Number 13, stop it, you keep doing it wrong!” the man on the platform finally barked. “Get out of here.”

   “They had to leave and practice on their own until they got it right,” Gabriele said.

   The last day of practice was Thursday. The practice and subsequent dress rehearsal ended close to midnight, a 16-hour day instead of a 12-hour day. “It went so long they ran out of food,” Gabriele said. “I was sick tired. My calves were cramping so bad. I was praying to God, let me get through this. At one point I had to stop. And then the man on the platform pointed at me and said, ‘You need to run!’”

   In the end it ended well. The man on the platform announced they wouldn’t have to brush anything up on Friday morning. “Thank you so much for everything you’ve done,” he said. “I really appreciate it. I know I’ve been yelling at you guys, but you have all been fantastic. I love you.”

   “It was so heartfelt and moving,” Gabriele said. “ He told us to go out and just dance.”

   The theme of the 2024 Centenary Song and Dance Celebration was “May the Green Forest Grow.” It brought together 37,000 artisans, singers, and dancers. The audience for the 14 large scale events during the week was in the hundreds of thousands. Song Day on July 6th featured 400 choirs on the outdoor stage. The performance was in the spirit of the Singing Revolution of 1987-91, when Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania defied their Soviet occupiers by breaking out into native songs. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 everybody sang “Hit the Road Jack.” They put some oomph into it by finishing with “and don’t you come back no more, no more.”

   “The event shows our resilience and that music unites people and inspires them to break free from repressive regimes and fight for their country’s sovereignty,” said Saulius Liausa, director of the Lithuanian Song Celebration. “We had to fight for freedom to preserve our cultural identity, traditions, and language.”

   Friday was Dance Day. Svytutys performed at 1 PM and again at 9 PM. “The dance concert was close to where we were staying,” Gabriele said. “We walked there in our costumes.” The were many other groups walking to the venue as well. The streets were soon overflowing with them. “There were thousands of us.” The groups gathered and waited on adjoining fields for their turn to dance in the stadium. At the event groups rotated in and out during the two-hour shows. Video cameras on the ground and in the sky recorded the carousal.

   “My mom went to the show,” Gabriele said. “She said it was OK, but when she saw the replay on LRT TV, she said it was amazing.”

   On Saturday morning a parade of the singing and dancing participants walked the several miles to the Song Day venue. “All of us had our full costumes on,” Gabriele said. “It was very cool.” The participants included children, teenagers, adults, and older folks. “My uncle lives in Lithuania, on a farm. He’s in his late 60s but came to Vilnius to dance.”

   When the last song faded away late Saturday night, the 2024 Centenary Song and Dance Celebration was officially over. The participants from 21 countries said their goodbyes and went their own way. The Australians had the longest flight home. They smeared their crackers with Vegemite, the down under by-product paste.

   “History is pretty clear today,” Saulius Liausa said  “Our festival was the only way to keep the tradition alive, to not forget.” It kept the cultural fires burning through the war years and the occupation years. The flames reached free Lithuanian communities everywhere. A fair highlighting those communities around the world was sponsored by the Vilnius Town Hall Square.

   The song and dance showcase on native soil happens every four years. The next one is in 2028. Lithuanian folk dancers worldwide are tapping their toes and waiting for their cue. Gabriele is sprucing up her old school costume and going back to practice.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Coney Island and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, scares up the shadows.

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A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

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Burning Down the House

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By Ed Staskus

   My father was born in the village of Vadzgiris in 1892. Lithuania had been under the thumb of the Russians for a hundred years. They had wiped the name of the country off the map. They instead called the land the “Western Provinces.” They had declared a press ban thirty years earlier that prohibited printing Lithuanian books in the Latin alphabet. Cyrillic script became obligatory, no matter what my father or anybody else said. A large scale crop failure in 1892 led to widespread famine. Migration to North America swelled to a tidal wave after that. That same year the first light bulb in the country was lit in the town of Rietavas. There was at least one small light at the end of the tunnel.

   A certificate of baptism makes the birth place and birth year of Antanas Staskevicius, my father, clear as day. That is probably where he grew up, although it is uncertain. He had a younger brother, Juozas, who not wanting to be drafted into the Imperial Russian Army, emigrated to the United States. My father served in the Czar’s army in Saransk. He always said it was in the middle of nowhere, although nobody knew for sure where the middle was. My mother was a native Russian he met there, a school teacher, pretty as a postcard. They started a family in 1916, starting with my two sisters.

   When the Bolsheviks took over from the Czar they sent many military officers to jail. Since my father was a Lithuanian they let him return to his country. In those days Lithuanians who returned from the Russian Imperial Army were not looked upon favorably. Their Russian wives were even less popular. But as time went on people got used to them.

    At first, my father lived in Siauliai. Later on, he lived in Kaunas. Around 1930 he went to work in Panevezys for a short time. I spoke only Russian until I was four or five years old, no matter that my mother spoke Lithuanian very well, without an accent. Although she was Russian Orthodox, we went to a Catholic Church, acceding to my father’s wishes. I would occasionally go to the Russian Orthodox Church with my mother, but only when my father was away from home. 

   I was born in Siauliai, not far from the Hill of Crosses, in 1924, even though we did not live there at the time. After I was born my father moved to Kaunas. He became the Director of the Department of Citizen Protection there. Later on we moved back to Siauliai. My father was appointed the Chief of Police.  He used to wear a fancy uniform when he would attend events. It was always exciting to see him in it.  He was in charge of the entire region as well as the police department. 

   I remember Police Captain Kurpius. He had a big face and a small mouth. He would stop at our house after duty hours to eat and smoke. He and my father drank vodka and sang all night. My mother plucked a kankles while they sang. Both of  my sisters were friends with the daughters of the man who was the director of the Teacher’s College. They dreamt about becoming teachers like our mother.

   Sometime in 1938 or 1939 my father was transferred from Siauliai to Panevezys and then to Zarasai. Augustinas Voldemaras lived in Zarasai at that time. He had been banished there after briefly serving as the country’s first prime minister. He was a stubborn man with a quick temper. He often came to our house. I used to go with my father to the sauna where I rubbed  Augustinas Voldemaras’ lower back for him. When he felt better he used to run out of the sauna and jump into an ice hole.

   I did not finish grade school. I went for only two grades since I did not find it difficult. My father hired a tutor for me and two of my friends. The tutor helped us prepare for the high school exams. We passed the exams and started high school. We were the youngest in the class. Since I attended three different high schools, in Siauliai, Panevezys, and Zarasai, I could not remember the names of my classmates very well. 

   My father had a good friend in Kaunas who was a certain Mr. Dagys. My mother was good friends with his wife. When they would come to our house I used to have to hold the door open for them. I did not like to kiss the hands of married women, which at that time was customary, but I had to kiss her hand.  One time I cut my lip on a diamond ring she was wearing.

   We had an open air Chevrolet Eagle Cabriolet. When the famous pilot Feliksas Vaitkus, the second Lithuanian after Darius and Girenas to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, came to Panevezys. I went with our driver, who called the car “Stovebolt” after its engine, and my father to the train station to meet him. I was on the edge of my seat being in the car with the aviator. Later in the day he met with the public and gave a long speech I didn’t listen to.

   When we lived in Zarasai we had a driver who was a police officer.  He wore a peaked visor cap with a cockade fixed to the front. My father and I lived there by ourselves for a year. My mother was supposed to join us as soon as we were established, but she never came. The year passed quickly and then the Russians came. My father returned to Siauliai, since he, like all officials, was relieved of his duties. 

   He spent most of his time in the hinterland instead of the city. Our farm in Dainai was a model farm. In the summer excursions would come from all over to see our land and operation. We had all the newest tools and farming equipment, both cutting and sowing implements. We had many cows and an orchard of yellow Alyvinis apples.

   After the Russians came our car was taken away. In 1940 the mood was very bad. We had a fear of the future in the pit of our stomachs. My father was seized by the Russians a week before the mass deportations of 1941. They took him as he was, just the shirt on his back and wearing sandals. Three men came in a passenger car. They asked my father for some help. They claimed they were having car trouble, or maybe they needed water. My father walked over to them and they shoved him into the back seat of the car. I was not at home. I was taking my exam at the high school. My mother called the high school. I sped home right away on my bicycle, but there wasn’t anything I could do.

   Later, my mother and I went to the prison and took clothes and food for my father. We weren’t allowed see him. We drove to the NKVD office in the County Police Headquarters where we were told to go home. No one explained anything to us. I never saw him again. He was sent to a slave labor camp in Siberia and starved to death in 1942. 

   The mass deportations began in June. When they started my mother and I hid in the woods. When things got better we went home. One of my sisters was living in Vilnius. My mother said to me, “Go to Vilnius and warn her to watch out for herself.” Soon after I got there a neighbor called and told me to come back. He said my mother might be arrested. She was hiding in his root cellar. In the meantime, the  Germans went to war with the Russians, occupying the country, and it was toilsome trying to return. No one was allowed to travel without permission, but I got lucky. Someone who had been a policeman in Siauliai was working with the Germans in Vilnius. At one time he had worked for my father. He was taking care of travel documents. I don’t remember his name, but I went to him, he introduced me to a German officer, and I got permission to travel by train. I returned to Siauliai. 

   After my father was sent to Siberia I had to manage the farm. I knew almost nothing about farming, even though I thought I knew in the fall the fields had to be plowed. I told the farm hands who had not run away, “Go plow the fields.” A neighbor saw them and ran over and said, “What the hell are you doing? You are plowing next year’s clover under.” 

   I hurt my hand during the war. I had ridden out with a horse drawn mower to cut hay. I saw that rain was coming. I tried to speed things up. Instead of sitting down as you should I walked beside the horses so that I could get them to pull the mower faster. As I was encouraging them I tripped and fell on the blades. The horses stopped. My right hand was almost cut off. The farmhand who was helping me ran over and, seeing my mangled hand, fainted. Meanwhile, my hand was hanging there and I was losing blood. I ran a kilometer to the prisoner camp where Red Army troops were being held, which was also in Dainai, for medical help. An ambulance came and rushed me to the hospital.

   My mother was arrested and deported in 1944. She spent twelve years in Siberia. Later, after Stalin’s death, she was released, but was not allowed to return to Dainai or Siauliai. Nobody said why. She was moved into a cinder block apartment in Silute near the Curonian Lagoon.

   I fled Lithuania when the Russians came back. I escaped with a company of Werhmacht leaving the Red Army prison camp in their Opel Blitz trucks. Their aim was to get to East Prussia. They were in a big hurry and only gave me a few minutes to gather what I could. We were a mile away when I looked back. I could see black smoke from our house and barn that the Russians had set on fire.

   I went to Germany where I stayed for five years. At first I lived in a DP camp. I worked wherever I could doing whatever I could, I sold chocolate and cigarettes and shoes on the black market. I found legitimate work with the International Refugee Organization in 1948. I left for Sudbury, Ontario in 1949. I worked in a nickel mine, thousands of feet deep, working there for nearly seven years. There were many expatriates holding down jobs in Canada. Some cut down forests, which was hard work. Some went into the mines, which was dangerous work, but for men who barely spoke English and who did not have any specialty, the pay was good. I worked as a black powder man. I worked laying tracks for trains that carried the ore. Eventually I got an easier job driving underground tractors.

   It was In Sudbury that I made a family. My three children were born there. My wife, Angele Jurgelaityte, was from southwestern Lithuania, from a small farm near Gizai, five kilometers from Marijampole. We met in Nuremberg where she was a nurse. She helped operate on my hand, which needed two more operations to restore its use to me. 

   After five years of living in Sudbury we started planning where we would live next. Most of the Lithuanians in the city were looking for better prospects. Many left for Montreal and Toronto, others to Chicago and Pittsburgh. We all started to go our separate ways. When I was living in Germany I had applied for a visa to live in the United States, in case the prospect ever arose. When the opportunity came we sold our house in Sudbury. We moved to Cleveland, Ohio in late 1957 with our children. My older sister and her husband were living there.

   At the time I fled Lithuania my younger sister was forced to stay behind. We had all fled separately. She was unable to evade the Russians and get across the border. She stayed locked up behind the Iron Curtain for the rest of her life.

   When I went back to Lithuania for the first time in 1979 I looked for our farm. I hadn’t seen it for thirty five years. Our house and barn were gone. There was a collective on most of the land. I found an old woman who remembered my parents. She briefly told me some things. She told me that in 1957 my mother searched for me by printing an announcement through the Red Cross in the American Lithuanian newspaper Darbininkas. A priest from Siauliai, Father Justinas Lapis, helped us to make the connection with my mother. He had looked after her welfare when she returned to Lithuania from Siberia.

   After arriving in Lithuania I was determined to see her, no matter what the restrictions were. At first I tried to travel secretly to Silute, but was stopped in Ukmerge and ordered to go back to Vilnius. The next day I got permission to go for one day and was able to get a car. They charged me two hundred American dollars for it, which was highway robbery, especially since the car was of such poor quality. I visited with my mother and we spent three hours together. The car broke down on our way back to Vilnius.

   From our former farm the city of Siauliai is five kilometers away. It was a busy city, or so it seemed to me after we went there from Panevezys, which seemed to be a very quiet city. Everyone used to say that Siauliai was known for its hooligans, although I didn’t see any.  I did not like Siauliai when I lived there. The requirements of the high school there were not strict. I didn’t like that. The high school in Panevezys was very strict. The director would personally make sure everyone was in uniform, that their collars were buttoned and ties knotted, whereas the high school in Siauliai was not strict about the dress code, at all. 

   After a few years in the United States my wife and I shortened our surname from Staskevicius to something easier to pronounce. Since I worked in international business it was bothersome always explaining my family name to foreigners. I worked for TRW for seventeen years, selling auto parts worldwide. I was a Manager for International Service and traveled all over South America. Later they closed our division and gave the older workers pensions. In 1984 | collaborated to start the Taupa Credit Union in Cleveland. I worked there for six years before leaving. I became an international trade consultant and started traveling to Lithuania often. We tried to buy and sell a number of things, not all of them successfully. 

   One thing, furniture plugs, was successful. In the United States there are only a few companies that manufacture them because you need good birch trees. Lithuania has plenty of good birch trees. We negotiated there for two years. We looked for partners in Kazlu Ruda, a city near Marijampole, and Panevezys, to no avail. We finally found a group in Elektrenai, in southeastern Lithuania, to partner with and who we successfully began doing business with in the United States.

   Birch trees lose their leaves in early fall in the Baltics, but they keep their roots intact year after year. Winter storms in the land of forests make the trees dig deep to stay the course. They are a pioneer species. They are the first to regrow after wildfires and ecological disturbances. When I set foot in North America I had to make a new home far from home. I had to carry my roots with me. I planted them where I landed, which was all I could do.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Coney Island and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, scares up the shadows.

Available on Amazon and Apple Books

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Working Side of the Altar

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By Ed Staskus

   “Mom, can you write me a note for school tomorrow saying I can’t be an altar boy,” I asked my mother after we had finished watching every minute of “The Wide World of Disney” and “The Ed Sullivan Show.” She pulled a face. I gave her my best first-born smile. I didn’t have a plan so much as a hope.

   Every Sunday night my parents snacked on smoked eels while my brother, sister, and I munched on handfuls of popcorn from yellow plastic bowls sitting in front of our Zenith console in the basement. It was a family ritual. We loved Walt Disney, but the ‘Great  Stone Face’ wasn’t a chip off the old block. He was the unfunniest man on TV. The circus acts and comedians were fun, but the opera singers and dramatic monologues were dull as turned off. None of us understood what the Little Italian Mouse was up to, either.

   I asked my mother for the note after I was out of the tub, in pj’s, and my book bag was ready for the coming up Monday morning. I wanted it to be short and sweet, as though it were no big deal, routine, really. I thought pleading something along the lines 

of all my spare time already being spent on my studies would be the way to go. I knew I was walking a thin line, though. My parents wanted me to be an altar boy. They went to mass every Sunday, which meant we all went. “Everybody went to church back then,” according to my mother. “There were two masses every Sunday. The church was full of people. We went early to get a pew.”

   My mother always went to church because she had always gone. “I grew up that way,” she said. My father, on the other hand, was a true believer. He was an accountant and counted on getting to Heaven. Even though he wasn’t a betting man, he put his money on Pascal’s Wager. The wager argues that a thinking person should live as though God exists and try to believe in him. If God doesn’t exist, there will only be a few finite losses, like no good times with too much money and too many girlfriends. When you are dead and gone you won’t miss them. But if God does exist, there are infinite gains, like spending eternity in Heaven, and no infinite losses, like spending eternity in Hell. 

   After he told me about the parlay there was no arguing with him about whether I was going to faithfully serve as an altar boy. “St. George is one of the Holy Helpers,” he said. The nuns at school thought George was a stud, the Trophy Bearer. I helped myself out by biting my tongue. As far as my father was concerned, I was going to be an altar boy, no dust up about it.

   The most embarrassed I ever was as a child was when my parents made me go to a Sunday mass one morning dressed up in a Buster Brown sailor suit. Something happened to the costume before the next Sunday. It was never found alive again. I had to go to confession after telling my mother I had no idea what happened to it. The fashion show took months to live down at school. I had to wrestle my way out of several mean-spirited jibes. There will be blood in grade school.

   St. George’s church, school, and parish hall were a three-in-one package, a rectangular two-and-a-half story brick building on Superior Ave. and E. 67th St. The church was on the top floor, the school on the middle floor, and the hall on the half-in-the-ground floor. The hall doubled as a civil defense shelter in case of a nuclear war, even though it was unclear what we going to do down there after the atomic bomb had blown the city to kingdom come.

   I was glad my mother didn’t downpress me about it, but wrote a note, sticking it in an envelope, sealing it, and finishing it off with my teacher’s name on the front. A small whitecap of uncertainty took shape in my mind at my mother’s readiness to do my bidding, but I put my doubts to rest and slept well that night. The next morning I gave the envelope to my third-grade teacher, Sister Matilda, a gnarly disciplinarian who had press-ganged me and a half-dozen other boys into the altar boy operation the second week of school. I found out later it was an annual recruitment drive.

   She read the note, smiled, and said, “Very good, you start next Monday.”

   How could that be? What happened between last night and now?  I realized my own mother had monkey wrenched me. When I asked her about it, she said, “As a mother I do the possible and leave the impossible to God.” I had already heard God helps those who help themselves, but that didn’t seem to be working out for me.

   St. George’s edifice was the biggest Lithuanian building in Cleveland. It was built in 1921. It was at the center of the ethnic neighborhood and some parishioners had Lithuanian-related businesses, like a newspaper and some kind of historical outfit, nearby. The east side along Lake Erie was full of Poles, Slovenians, Croatians, and Lithuanians.

   The parish priest, Father Ivan, short for his civvy name Balys Ivanauskas, lived in a seven-bedroom Italianate-style rectory a stone’s throw from the church. It had originally been built for a big family in the 1880s. Our teachers, the Sisters of St. Francis of the Providence of God, lived together in a smaller house on Superior Ave. two or three minutes away. There were eight of them, not including the Mother Superior. They could have used some of Father Ivan’s empty bedrooms. As it was they had to double up.

   The sisters were a hard-boiled bunch. They were strict as could be about us taking our studies seriously and behaving in class. Those were rules number one and two. There were no other rules. They weren’t above hitting us with rolled-up Catholic Universe Bulletins. Nobody’s parents ever complained about it, so none of us ever complained about it to them. What would have been the point? Our parents would only have asked, “What did you do?” There was never a good answer to that.

   The nuns never sweated getting the job done. In fact, they didn’t sweat at all. Wearing thick bulky habits they should have been the first to perspire whenever it got hot, but they never did. Nobody knew how they did it, if it was part of their training or some kind of black magic from the Middle Ages.

   Even though I hadn’t been baptized at St. George’s I was an altar boy at many baptisms there. One time at the font a baby streamed pea green apple sauce puke on my surplice and another time one burped and farted and messed up Father Ivan. I had to run back to the supply closet and get wet rags. I sprayed the boss with a new kind of aerosol called Lysol some busybody had donated.

   I received my First Communion at St. George’s and was confirmed there. The First Communion happens when as a Catholic you attain the Age of Reason. I don’t know how any of us were ever awarded the sacred host when we were, because I definitely didn’t attain the Age of Reason in grade school, nor had anyone else in my class, unless they were faking it.

   My reason was affected by reading boy’s books in my spare time, adventures about running for your life, spies, foreign lands, full moons, secrets, ray guns, tommy guns, femme fatales, hooded supervillains, back alleys, conspiracies, and the bad guys foiled at the last minute by the good guys. The paperbacks seeded my nightly dreams and I cooked up twisty exploits all night long, waking up glad I had survived. 

   Before we got thrown to the lions we got trained in the performance basics, how to dress, the call and response, and how to arrange the corporal, the purificator, the chalice, the pall, and the big Missal. We learned how to hold liturgical books for Father Ivan when he was proclaiming prayers with outstretched hands. We brought him thuribles, the lavabo water and towel, and vessels to hold the consecrated bread.

   We helped with communion, presenting cruets of wine and water for him to pour into the chalice. When he washed his hands standing at the side of the altar we poured the water over them. If incense was used, we presented the thurible and incense to Father Ivan, who smoked the offerings, the cross and the altar, after which we smoked the priest and people. It had one flavor, a rotting pomegranate smell. The thurible was a two-piece metal chalice with a chain that we swung side to side. God forbid anybody got slap happy and swung it too high, hitting something with it, and spilling the hot coals, threatening to burn the church down. That was when Father Ivan became Ivan the Terrible.

   We rang a handbell before the consecration, when the priest extended his hands above the holy gifts. We rang the bell again when, after the consecration of the bread and wine, the priest showed the host and then the chalice. “Ring dem’ bells” is what we liked doing best.

   I started low man on the totem pole, which meant the 7 o’clock weekday morning shift. Even though everybody went to church, nobody went to church first thing in the morning Monday through Friday. At least, almost nobody. The man in charge was always there for sure with one of his altar boys. I had to get up at 5:30 in the morning, pour myself a bowl of Cheerios and a glass of orange juice, catch a CTS bus on the corner of St. Clair Ave. and E. 127th St., toss exact change into the fare box, stay away from the crazy people on the bus, run through the church to the sacristy, get into my uniform, and make sure I had my cheat sheet. Among other things I had to be on time, or else.

   The mass was performed in Latin, most of the time the priest’s back to the congregation, and we followed his lead. There were prescribed times we had to respond by voice to something Father Ivan recited. It was only when we offered Holy Communion that I finally faced the nave and saw the only people in church were old and older, unemployed, worried about something, or simply in the wrong place. 

   One benefit to hardly anybody being in the pews first thing in the morning was whenever I made a mistake it usually stayed between me and my maker. That is, unless Ivan the Terrible, who had eyes in the back of his head and whose hearing was better than a moths, saw and heard what I had done wrong.

   Moths have the best hearing in the world, next to priests, who are accustomed to listening to whispers in the confessional. I was waiting for my turn one afternoon after school when I heard Father Ivan bellow, “What did you say?” and the next thing I knew a red-faced boy burst out of the booth running, followed by the dark-faced priest. I slipped quietly away. There was no need to put myself in harm’s way for somebody else’s mortal sins.

   When I started Father Bartis was in charge, but the next year Father Ivan became the parish priest. He was a burly man. None of us knew where he came from or how old he was, although we guessed he was between thirty and sixty. I could never tell the age of adults. All I knew was they weren’t new anymore. He ran the parish until 1980. He smoked a lot, which we could smell on his breath when he got close to us, and sometimes we caught a whiff of spirits. We all knew what strong drink smelled like because almost everybody’s parents drank. They were Lithuanian, after all.

   He liked to take walks and mind his own business, unless he was minding ours. We were always under the gun. He was irascible to begin with and screwing around with his life’s work brought out the worst in him. Our school janitor said he had never met anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible, just like Father Ivan. He was short-tempered but his bark was worse than his bite. The nuns put him to shame when it came to crime and punishment.

   All of us carried cheat sheets at mass. Latin was a foreign language, as well as a dead language. None of us were taking classes in it and none of us knew what we were saying. Our responses during mass were rote, except when something went wrong, when we improvised with mumbles. It wasn’t speaking in tongues, but Father Ivan warned us exorcism was imminent if we didn’t learn our lines.

   The Eucharist was the high point of mass. It got us off our knees and on our feet. We helped in the distribution by holding a communion plate under everybody’s chin when the priest gave them the wafer. There would have been hell to pay if there was an accident, like the wafer falling out of somebody’s mouth and landing on the floor. It would have meant saying a million Hail Mary’s and a thousand turns around the Stations of the Cross.

   After gaining seniority I was promoted off the morning shift and started serving at Sunday masses, funerals, and weddings. Sunday mass was more of the same, only longer and more elaborate, but at least I got to sleep in and go to church in the family car instead of a city bus full of nobody I knew.

   Funerals were usually scheduled on Mondays and Fridays. I began to think weekends coming and going were a dangerous time. At one Friday funeral Father Ivan spoke glowingly of all the good works the deceased had done and how he was sure the man was going to Heaven. “The way to the brightness is through good works,” he said. “The first thing we all have got to do is do good.”

   The other altar boy and I were standing on either side of the dead man in his pine box. The boy’s name was Zedonas. Everybody called him Zed. He leaned over the open casket and whispered, “What you got to do first is be dead.”

   The corpses always looked like wax figures. They didn’t bother us over much, but the occasional mewling coffin sounds freaked us out. None of us especially enjoyed funerals, not because we were near at hand to the dead, but because everybody was down in the dumps, and on top of everything else we were rarely gifted with cash. It dismayed us to see the family light candles at a votive stand and push folded ones and fives into the offering box.

   Weddings were a different story. Everybody was in a good mood. They were festive. It was always a sunny day. The brides looked great in their white dresses with trains. Heaven help the altar boy who stepped on a moving train and yanked it off. The number one perk of serving at a wedding was we were always rewarded. The best man was usually the man who slipped us an envelope and told us what a great job we had done, even though we never did anything great beyond kneeling and standing around, like we always did.

   Weddings in July and August were usually hot and humid happenings. One time the groom himself paid us in advance in silver dollars, ten of them for each of us. It was an unexpected windfall. I wrapped mine up in a handkerchief. Everybody was sweating during the ceremony. When it came time for communion I reached into my pocket for the handkerchief to dry my hands. It would have been bad if I let the cruet slip. 

   When I did, a silver dollar slipped out from my handkerchief, rolled down the two steps in the gap between the altar rail, past the bride and groom, and down the center aisle of the nave. A man stuck his foot out and corralled it with his shoe. I was relieved when I saw it was my uncle, who was an accountant like my father. He knew the value of a dollar.

   One time Jon Krokey, a fellow traveler at Holy Family Church, dropped the Roman Missal, which was very bad. It is a large heavy book that includes all the words and prayers the priest uses during mass, except for the readings. It is second in line only to the Holy Bible

   “I was the bottom man, so I got to get up in the middle of the night to serve at morning mass,” he said. “While transporting the giant book I dropped it and it bounced down the stairs all the way to the communion rail. Father Andrel chewed me out in front of the congregation, which was ten elderly women in the front pews, all wearing babushkas. When he was done spewing, I quit. After that all the nuns at school mean face mugged me like I was the Antichrist.”

   My tour of duty ended at the end of sixth grade when my parents moved out of the neighborhood and I transferred to another Catholic school. They already had a full complement of altar boys and my services weren’t needed. I was happy enough to go back to being a spectator.

   When St. George’s Catholic Church closed in 2009 it was the oldest Lithuanian parish in North America. At the last mass three priests presided and there were a host of altar boys and girls. Back in the day we would have welcomed girls to our ranks, even though they weren’t allowed. They were better at cleaning than us and we knew we could boss them around, although they were also slowly but surely getting to be nice to have around as friends.

   The altar was given away to another church. The playground and parking lot were sold, and the grounds converted to greenhouses. The rectory was boarded up. The convent was already long gone, since the school had closed years before. A chain link fence was set up all around the building and that was that. There were no more dragons real or imagined for the soldier saint to slay. The day of the Holy Helper was done. St. George took a knee.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Coney Island and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, scares up the shadows.

Available on Amazon and Apple Books

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

On the Spot

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By Ed Staskus

   When Frank Gwozdz and Tyrone Walker sat down in front of Lieutenant Ed Kovacic’s desk, Tyrone had a thick sheaf of files with him. Their ranking officer behind the desk looked at them. Tyrone looked at his ranking officer. Frank looked at the windows. It was windy and raining hard. The Central Station wasn’t what it used to be. Frank watched rain leaking in through the windows. He believed in keeping the out of doors where it belonged, which was out of doors. It wasn’t his problem, though. The city’s solution to  problems was often as bad as the problem. He turned his attention back to the matter at hand.

   “These are files of all the bombings the past five years in northeast Ohio, including the Youngstown bombings, which are almost as everyday as ours,” Tyrone said. Youngstown had long since been dubbed “Crime Town USA” by the Saturday Evening Post. Their gang wars had been going on as long as those in Cleveland. 

   “You can keep those on your lap for now, son,” Lieutenant Kovacic said. “Never mind about northeast Ohio. Forget about Youngstown. Concentrate on Cleveland.” A close second to Tyrone not liking being called nigger was not liking being called son. He did a slow burn but didn’t say anything. Saying something would have been a mistake. He bit his tongue.

   Ed Kovacic wasn’t born a police officer. He was born a Slovenian and baptized at St. Vitus Catholic Church, but everybody knew he was going to die a police officer. When he did the funeral mass was going to be at St. Vitus. Whenever anybody called him a cop, he reminded them with a stern look that he was a police officer. He hardly ever had to say it twice. When he did have to say it twice, his fellow police officers took a step away from whoever had called him a cop one too many times.

   “We don’t mind the Irish and Italian mobs blowing each other up, it keeps our cells spick and span, but they’ve started killing bystanders,” he said. “We can’t stand for that, which is why we are adding men to this investigation.”

   When Ed Kovacic graduated the police academy the first assignment he had was to walk a beat in the 6th District. He worked his way up to the Decoy Squad, the Detective Bureau, and finally the Bomb Squad. He married his high school sweetheart in 1951 before shipping off to the Korean War. When he got back he and his wife got busy in bed making six children. After that his wife stayed busy raising them. They lived in North Collinwood. 

   “We want to get them before they get more civilians. That’s your number one job from now on. When you’ve got the goods on one of them report to me. Make sure the charges are tight as a drum so we don’t wind up wasting our time. If you apprehend somebody red-handed, do what you have to do. Try to get him back here in one piece so we can question him.” He gave his police detectives a sharp look. 

   “Are we clear about that?”

   “Yes, sir,” Tyrone said. He knew his rulebook inside and out. Frank nodded. He had his own rule book spelling out what one piece meant. It meant still breathing.

   “The first thing I want you to do is go over to Lakewood. I talked to the chief there and he’s expecting you. After you see him, I want you to find Richie Drake and find out what he knows, or at least what he’s willing to tell you. He’s one of our on-again off-again informers. He’s a west side man. I understand he spends most of his life at the Tam O’Shanter there in Lakewood.”

   “I know the man and I know the place,” Frank said. He knew every stoolie in town, just like he knew every bar on every side of town that served food and drink to wrongdoers.

   “Which reminds me, the Plain Dealer boy who saw it happen, his father called, said the boy has something to tell us. Here’s the address.” He handed Frank a slip of paper.  “Stop there while you’re on that side of town and find out what he has to say.”

   Lakewood City Hall, its courtroom, and the police department, were on Detroit Ave., closer to Cleveland than the rest of the near west side suburb. Frank parked in the back. He and Tyrone went inside and waited. When they met with the police chief there wasn’t much he could tell them, other than to say his department would do all it could do to help. 

    “We believe in law and order here,” he said. “You point them out, we’ll lock them up.”

   Lakewood’s first jail was in the Halfway House, which was a bar on Detroit Ave., in one of the back rooms that had a locking door. It was soon relocated to a barn where lawbreakers were kept in two steel cages. After that they were kept in the basement of a sprawling house at the corner of Detroit Ave. and Warren Rd.

   After World War One Lakewood’s main streets, like Detroit Ave. and Clifton Blvd., began to be paved. When they were, speeding problems surfaced. The police force grew, adding two motorcycle men, to patrol Clifton Blvd. and Lake Ave., the streets where the better half lived. A Friday Night Burglar plied his trade on those streets, forcing the police to work overtime while those they were protecting were out on the town. The burglar was never caught. The better half bought more valuables to replace those that went missing.

   When Frank and Tyrone walked into the Tam O’Shanter the late afternoon crowd was starting to fill it up. They made their way to the bar. The bartender asked them what they would have.

   “Don’t I know you?” Frank asked.

   Jimmy Stamper was the bartender. “Maybe, but I don’t know you,” he said, wiping his hands with a damp rag.

   “Are you in a band?”

   “I’m a drummer, been in plenty of bands,” Jimmy said.

    “Are you in a band called Standing Room Only.”

   “You have a good memory,” Jimmy said. “That would have been around 1969, maybe 1970. It sounds like you liked our sound.”

   Frank didn’t tell Jimmy he had been tailing a suspect who was at a bar the band was playing at. The man stayed there until closing time which meant Frank stayed there until closing time. Surveillance was the easiest but most time-consuming part of his job. He had never liked rock and roll and after that night he disliked it even more. Standing Room Only played rock and roll covers. The only one Frank liked was their cover of the Venture’s tune “Hawaii Five-O.”

   “We’re looking for Richie,” Frank said, flashing his badge just long enough for Jimmy to get a peek of it. The bartender hitched his thumb over his left shoulder. “Last booth over there by the men’s toilets. He’s got a blonde with him. He should still be sober. At least he’s still doing all the sweet talking.”

   Frank sat down on the other side of Richie Drake after giving the blonde the thumb. “Drift” is what he said to her. She sat at the bar sulking. Tyrone stood to the side, neither near nor far, but close enough so that Richie knew he was between him and the door. Pinball machines and their pinball wizards were making a racket opposite the booth.

   “What can I do for you?” Richie Drake asked.  He didn’t bother asking who they were.

   Somebody slid a dime into the Rock-Ola jukebox. “It’s just your jive talkin’, you’re telling me lies, yeah, jive talkin’” the Bee Gees sang in their trademark falsetto style. Frank thought they sounded like pansies.

   “That business last Sunday down the street,” Frank said.

   “What business?”

   “You can either tell me here or out back while my partner has a Ginger Ale.”

   “Hold your horses,” Richie said. “Everybody knows it was the Italians.”

   “Why?”

   “I don’t know, exactly, but it had something to do with the Irishman. The guy who got it was a bog hopper. They can’t get to the main man, but they got to him.”

   “One more time, why?”

   “So far as I know, it was a message more than anything else.”

   “A message from who exactly?”

   “The way I hear it, it was Jack White.”

   Frank let it go at that. It seemed to him that Richie Drake didn’t know a hell of a whole lot. The police detective stood up and walked away. He stopped at the Rock-Ola jukebox and glanced at the playlist. He walked back to the booth. “I need a dime,” he said. Richie gave him a dime. He selected a song by B. J. Thomas. The juke box was playing the tune when he and Tyrone left.

   “Hey, wontcha play another somebody done somebody wrong song, so sad that it makes somebody cry, and make me feel at home.”

   Frank and Tyrone drove to Ethel Ave. They stopped and looked at Lorcan Sullivan’s corner house but didn’t bother getting out of the car. They drove to Tommy Monk’s house, parking across the street. Frank pressed the doorbell. When nobody answered they walked up the driveway to the backyard. The family was grilling out and having burgers and corn at a picnic table. A sweet gum tree kept them shaded. Chain link fencing and Japanese yews kept the yard private. Tommy’s father Einar invited them to sit down, bringing two lawn chairs out from the garage. Einar had changed the Old World family name but kept his given name. For all that, everybody and his wife called him Eddie.

   “How did you know the man in the corner house?” Frank asked Tommy. 

   “I delivered his paper every day,” Tommy said. “I knew him better than most because he tipped me better than most.”

   “Did you see anything before it happened?”

   “No, it was like any other Sunday morning, except it wasn’t raining or snowing.”

   “Did you see anything special after it happened?”

   “No.”

   “What is it you have to tell us?”

   “Mr. Sullivan asked me to keep an eye out for anybody prowling our street who didn’t look right. He always gave me a big bonus at Christmas. He told me what to look for. I never saw anybody until yesterday. The man I saw was just like what Mr. Sullivan said he might be. I memorized his license plate.”

   “What is it?”

   “Wait a minute,” Tommy said. “I need a copy of the newspaper.”

   He ran to the back door. A minute later he burst back through the door and ran to the picnic table. He had the front page of yesterday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer with him. He crossed out the headline and in its place wrote down the license plate number. He handed it to Frank.

   “Are you sure this is the number?”

   “I never make a mistake whenever I memorize anything this way.”

   “Good work, son,” Frank said. “If you see that man again, be careful. Don’t draw any attention to yourself. Tell your father right away.”

   He gave Eddie Monk his number. “Call me if your son spots anything else. I don’t think there’s any danger to him, but you never can tell. Make sure he knows not to talk to strangers.”

   “All my children already know that,” Eddie Monk said.

   “Good,” Frank said.

   The police detectives walked back to their car. Tyrone called in the license plate number. Frank smoked a cigarette while they waited. Tyrone had already formed  the impression Frank wasn’t big on small talk. He seemed to keep most talk to himself. When they got the license plate’s address, Tyrone wrote it down and handed it to his partner.

   “That’s in South Collinwood,” Frank said. “Let’s go there and pay Earnest Coote a visit.”

Excerpted from the crime novel “Bomb City.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Coney Island and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, scares up the shadows.

Available on Amazon and Apple Books

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Beware the Lithuanians

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By Ed Staskus

   Before the Battle of Blue Water was fought in the fall of 1363 the Russians had been under the thumb of Mongolia’s Golden Horde for more than a century. The Mongols invaded and conquered most of what is now Russia in the mid-1200s. They devastated the lands of the Kievan Rus. They cut down everyone in their way and sacked both Kiev and Chernigov, two of the largest cities. From then on the Russians paid bribes in gold and silver to the Golden Horde to keep them at bay. 

   After the Mongol Empire was divided into four Khanates, Genghis Khan’s grandson Batu Khan established his capital at Sarai on the Volga River.  It was near enough to the principalities of the Russians to keep them under control and close enough, whenever the need arose, to speedily get back to Mongolia, which was  across the treeless steppe of what is now Kazakhstan.

   The Mongols were known in Europe as Hell’s Horsemen. They could ride up to eighty miles a day if they had to. Their horses were short, stocky, and shaggy. They were never stabled, even during Mongolia’s brutal winters when temperatures dropped to thirty below zero. 

   “They are not very great in stature, but exceedingly strong, and maintained with little provender,” a 13th century Italian missionary priest said about the horses. Deadly accurate composite bows and innovative tactics won them battle after battle. By the time Genghis Khan and his sons were done the Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire in the world, then or now. It covered more than nine million square miles from Hungary in the west to China in the east.

   In the middle of the 14th century the Golden Horde was preparing to move against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It was the largest sovereign state in Europe, being the lands of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, as well as parts of Poland and Russia. The Mongols weren’t trying to bite off more than they could chew. They had already overrun Asia and the Middle East. Only the Turkish Mamluks had ever defeated them. When they invaded Europe Batu Khan inflicted a crushing defeat on King Béla IV’s Hungarian army, which had the best cavalry on the continent. The Mongols burned the city of Pest and seized control of the Hungarian plain. The Golden Horde wasn’t overly concerned about the Lithuanians.

   Kochubey, the strongman of the Golden Horde in southern Russia, was sitting on his horse at the top of a knoll looking westward in the spring of 1363. He had a small group of his commanders with him, as well as two mercenary Russian warlords. They had overrun Poland six years earlier, destroying Lublin. They were feeling their oats. The Golden Horde had meant to engage the Lithuanians the year before, but the weather had been bad, wet and soggy. It didn’t suit the Mongol horses. The recent spring had been dry and the summer promised to be a good one for campaigning. Kochubey was eager to be on the move. He had dynastic issues with his brothers, who were trying to kill him, if he didn’t kill them first. He needed to be at war somewhere. It was what he did best.

   Before the group broke up, their commitment and decisions made, the two Russians rode up to Kochubey. They had fought the Lithuanians before. One of the warlords leaned over his horse and said, “Beware the Lithuanians.” Kochubey snorted at the warning and puffed himself up. “The Lithuanians need to beware of us.” He wheeled his horse around and rode away. The Russians watched him go. They were hard men, but knew better than say anything more to their overlord. He was a harder man than them.

   Grand Duke Algirdas of Lithuania didn’t give a damn how dangerous the Mongols thought they were. He knew that ever since their empire had been split after the death of Genghis Khan they had been plagued by internal discord. The Golden Horde was in the middle of multiple succession disputes. They were fracturing into separate domains. The  resulting disorder was having a ruinous effect on their fighting men. It was a golden opportunity for Grand Duke Algirdas to expand  his southern territories. He wasn’t like the Russians who were content to pay tribute in return for an uneasy peace. If the Mongols wanted to come to him, all the better. He would make it easy for them by marching to the Don River near where they were. He would wait there while putting together his plan of action.

   The Lithuanian forces were made up of lightly armored knights on fast horses, foot soldiers armed with swords and spears, and crossbow men. They were disciplined and determined. They were not under any illusions. They knew the Golden Horde, despite its problems, was a formidable force. Mongols were merciless on the field of battle. They took few prisoners. They had proven that at Samarkand and Bukhara. There would be blood. The Baltic men were confident it would be the blood of Mongol men.

   Ianiunas was a crossbowman man. He was from western Lithuania, from near the Curonian Spit. For hundreds of years the Curonian Spit had been the location of a pagan trading center. The Teutonic Knights took it over in the 13th century, building a castle at Memel. It was where Ianiunas trained on the crossbow.  He joined Grand Duke Algirdas’s forces after getting sick and tired of the Order of Brothers of the German House of St. Mary in Jerusalem trying to convert him to Christianity. He was a pagan. He wasn’t going to convert to the White Christ, now or ever. He was going to live and die by the light of his own gods.

   Grand Duke Algirdas hadn’t converted, either. He worshiped the thunder god Perkunas. He was pagan to the core, like Ianiunas, even though he allowed Orthodox Christians living in Vilnius to build a church where the city’s gallows had once stood. It was the Grand Duke’s own private joke. He was a pagan, but he was a politician, too. He appointed Orthodox officials in the Slavic territories of Lithuania. He married one Orthodox princess after another. He didn’t need a weathercock to know which way the wind was blowing. 

   He was willing to bend but he wasn’t going to break. He and his brother Kestutis wanted the Teutonic Knights out of Lithuania. They were Germans. They were a threat to the throne. He had led Lithuanian and Slavic armies against them. During  the Uprising of the Night of Yury in 1345 one of the leaders of a provincial rebellion told the Grand Duke he had been elected king of the rebels. He was a peasant farmer. He informed the Grand Duke that if he followed him into battle the Germans would be driven away. Grand Duke Algirdas didn’t wet nurse the man. He cut his head off right away. A peasant farmer pretending to be a king was as much a threat as the Teutonic Knights.

   It was a sunny day in October when the Lithuanians engaged the Golden Horde. Grand Duke Algirdas moved his forces west and crossed the Dnieper River towards Podolia. The Mongols met the Lithuanians on the banks of a river near present-day Torhovytsia in southern Ukraine. The town was then known as Sinie Vody, or Blue Water. 

   The Lithuanians organized themselves into six groups arranged in a half circle. The Mongols began the battle with a barrage of arrows from their horsemen into both sides of the Lithuanian formation. The Lithuanians darkened the sky with bolts from their crossbows. Arrows from composite bows like what the Golden Horde fought with fly at 250 feet a second. Bolts from a crossbow fly at 350 feet a second. The leather armor many Mongols wore offered some protection from the bolts, at least until they didn’t. 

   A row of pikemen with shields protected the crossbowmen, as did a row of pavises. The crossbowmen fired from behind their wall. Every man had two men behind him loading crossbows and rotating them from the back to the front. They held firm, ignoring Mongolian feints. Ianiunas killed one Mongol after another until he ran out of bolts. When he did he unsheathed his sword and joined the foot soldiers.

   The Lithuanians moved forward with pikes, lances, and spears, breaking the front line of the Mongol army. The men of the Naugardukas attacked the disorganized flanks of the Golden Horde with fresh crossbows. The liegemen of Karijotas Gediminas, the son of the former Grand Duke Gediminas, moved in for the kill. The Mongols weren’t able to maintain their formation and broke into a retreat which became a rout. The field of battle became a killing field, the soil wet with blood. 

   At the end of the day Grand Duke Algirdas achieved an open and shut victory. Without meaning to, the nascent threat to European Christendom had been forestalled by a pagan. The victory secured Kiev and the northern Black Sea lands for the Lithuanians. The Grand Duchy gained access to the Black Sea. Grand Duke Algirdas left his son Vladimir in charge. Vladimir became a bitter rival to the Grand Duchy of Moscow on the day he assumed power. From that day on there was no love lost between the Lithuanians and the Russians.

   Ianiunas went home to his wife and children. He had a farmstead on the banks of the Nemunas River in the south of Lithuania. It was on the edge of an impenetrable forest. A fort had been built in nearby Alytus to protect against Crusader raids seeking cattle, slaves, and conversions. When he left the battlefield he walked while an ox pulled a two-wheeled tumbrel filled to the gills with spoils. It took him a month to get home. He got there in the middle of November in the middle of a snowstorm. He got hot kisses from his wife and fierce hugs from his children before they dug into the loot he had brought back. His favorite hound sniffed him up down and sideways before becoming his favorite hound again. The neighbors came over for tales of war told over a barrel of honey wine. Everybody got drunk as skunks.

   Three years later Ianiunas celebrated the marriage of his eldest daughter to an immigrant  Mongol by the name of Chagatai. He had fought on the losing side at the Battle of Blue Water. The train wreck that was the Golden Horde was hemorrhaging its own. Many of them went seeking refuge in faraway places, including Lithuania. Nearly fifty thousand Mongols migrated to the Grand Duchy in the 14th century. Their first settlements were near Grodno and Trakai. 

   The first thing they did was learn the Lithuanian language and where to pay their taxes. The Grand Duke didn’t in fact care what language they spoke, but he cared a great deal about taxes. They were permitted to build mosques, most of them being Muslims. They were allowed to marry Lithuanian women and raise Muslim children. In return, they were required to serve in the Grand Duchy’s soldiery. They had to provide their own weapons and horses. They patrolled borders and defended  towns and castles from attacks. 

   When it came to warfare they rode with own kind. Although they admitted the power of bolts, they had grown up learning to stand on the back of a galloping horse and hit a moving target with their composite bows. Their weapon was made of wood, sinew, and laminated horn. It was what steppe warriors had been using for a thousand years. They carried two or three bows and multiple quivers holding hundreds of arrows. The arrowheads were hardened by plunging them into brine after heating them until they were red hot. The Mongols were adept at firing their arrows at the split second all four of their horse’s hooves were off the ground, affording them a split second of stillness.

   Chagatai put his bows and arrows away the day of his wedding. By the time the spousal ceremony, the dinner of roasted wild boar, and the revelry were over, almost everybody’s feet were off the ground, except for Ianiunas and Chagatai. They stood on a grassy spot on the edge of a pond next to the family house. Ianiunas’s favorite hound had flopped down and was napping at his feet. Chagatai looked at the hound.

   “I will have many dogs,” he said.

   “Dogs are useful animals and good companions,” Ianiunas said.

   “They are loyal, too.”

   “Yes, dogs are the only creatures on this earth who will never betray you.”

   Chagatai was of the same mind. The two men stood next to each other gazing at star clusters in the inky sky. When Ianiunas’s hound started growling in his sleep and suddenly farted, both their faces creased up. Chagatai leaned down and patted the hound’s flank, who rolled over onto his feet and shook himself. The three of them watched for shooting stars but there weren’t any, until suddenly there was one. It was gone in the blink of an eye. They went back to the family house for whatever karvojus cake and honey wine was still to be had.     

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Coney Island and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, scares up the shadows.

Available on Amazon and Apple Books

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Not Fade Away

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By Ed Staskus

   I hadn’t been to a funeral in several years, but when we got the news that my wife’s uncle Romas Bublys had died, we made a point of going. Even though I am not a faithful churchgoer, I go to church for weddings and funerals. When grieving, obsequies are a way to create connection and acceptance about something beyond our control, and a way to begin moving forward. The ritual inspires catharsis, helping everybody, especially the immediate family, feel better. 

   Even if you didn’t know the deceased very well, going to a funeral to support a friend or a family can be the best reason of all. Funerals are one of the few times when saying “I’m sorry” doesn’t mean “I apologize.” It means “I understand.” It means you understand it is a difficult time. We are all in our own boat but everybody is in the same ocean.

   The requiem mass was at the Church of Gesu in University Hts. next to the campus of John Carroll University. Romas was a life-long devout Catholic. The church is a Jesuit church, one of only 60-some in the United States, and the university is a Jesuit school. Jesuit parishes are guided by the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, encouraging adherents to ponder their experiences and search for God’s presence in their lives. 

   I didn’t know Romas Bublys well. Even though we both lived in northeastern Ohio, we travelled in different circles. I might have met him face-to-face and spoken to him for the first time the day I got married in the Lithuanian church on the east side of Cleveland. Some of his daughters, my wife’s cousins, and nieces were in our wedding party. I knew them slightly, although I knew their mother, Ingrid, well enough through her undying work in the ethnic community.

   Romas was born in Taurage, Lithuania in 1936. The small city is on the Jura River not far from the Baltic Sea. Most of it was destroyed by fire in 1836 and again during World War One. After the war it was rapidly rebuilt, industrializing with new up-to-date factories. A revolt against the national authorities broke out there in 1927 but was suppressed. His family fled the country when the Red Army invaded in 1944. Romas was six years old. After five years of treading water in displaced person camps, the family emigrated to the United States.

   The funeral wasn’t standing room only, but it was close. There were 400-some mourners in attendance, almost filling the large church. There was a line snaking out the door to get inside when we got there. While we inched forward more cars crept into the parking lot and more people got in line. Even though I assumed most of everybody at the service was Lithuanian American like me, most of them were strangers to me.

   Romas grew up in Detroit before relocating to Cleveland, Ohio. He served in the US Army with the 82ndAirborne Division. He earned a master’s degree from Cleveland State University and an MBA from Baldwin Wallace University. He went to work for TRW. It was a systems and  aerospace company. They built spacecraft, including the Pioneer series. His professional life revolved around engineering.

   The Church of Gesu is spacious and almost regal. It isn’t new, built in 1958,  but it looks new. The superstructure is steel so there are no interior pillars. By the time we got in we were lucky to find a pew in the back. We sat with my brother-in-law’s family. The service was conducted by Fr. Lukas Leniauskas, the son of somebody I grew up with. He was 20 years old when he left Cleveland and went to Lithuania where he entered the Jesuit Novitiate. He professed perpetual vows two years later and was ordained a priest in 2015.

   Romas’s eldest daughter gave the eulogy. I wasn’t sure if she ever got to the end of it, or not. She choked up and seemed to cut it short. She said her father loved to travel and read. He was proud of his children. He believed in faith, family, and the homeland. He loved life. He was wise and funny, a family man as well as a businessman. She said their father taught the five children in the family how to be successful. “One thing he always said was dress for success. He never wore blue jeans.” The burly man in the pew in front of us was wearing a blazer with gilt buttons and blue jeans. He didn’t seem to take her remark the wrong way.

   Romas was big on keeping Lithuania alive in the hearts of his compatriots who had emigrated to the New World. He was on the National Board of Directors of the Lithuanian American Community. He was the Director of the Lithuanian Club in Cleveland and its Chairman for six terms. He didn’t sit on the sidelines. He got involved and stayed involved.

   Two more of Romas’s daughters spoke. A cellist played “Ave Maria.” There is a hymn sung at many Protestant funerals called “The Day Thou Gave Us Lord is Ended.” It wasn’t sung at the Jesuit church, although the sense of it hung in the air. Romas had a good voice and had performed with the Cleveland Male Octet. He would have done the song justice.

   The service ended with a homily and prayer of commendation. Two men guided the coffin from one end of the nave to the other end and into the narthex. They were accompanied by the priest, a cross-bearer, and the altar girls. In my day it was a boy’s club. One of the girls swung a thurible burning incense. She swung it forward and back in time with her steps. What I could smell of the smoke was pungent.

   I had been an altar boy and served at many funerals at St. George Catholic Church. The funerals were usually on Thursday and Friday afternoons. After the final blessing we always finished with a recessional, no matter how few or how many were in attendance. If there were many people, and I had my hands on the thurible, whenever I saw a friend of mine in a pew, as I passed by, I swung my thurible sideways so my friend would get a good whiff of the smoke. My passing was always marked by coughing in the pews. 

   When Romas’s coffin came to rest in the narthex, two unformed US Army servicemen draped an American flag over it. One of them saluted, holding the salute for several minutes. The other one said a few words. When they were done they ceremoniously folded the flag. The funeral was over when they were done.

   Everybody was invited to the parish hall in the basement. I exchanged small talk with some grown-ups and bantered talk with my brother-in-law’s kids until I noticed a man I thought I recognized. I stepped over to his table where he was alone. He was Arunas Bielinis, somebody from the east side ethnic crowd back in the day. He had made a career as a lawyer, so after we established our bona fines, he asked me twenty questions about myself. He told me his friend Kestutis Susinskas and he used to borrow books from me when we were teenagers. “We liked that you were always reading books by James Michener and Leon Uris,” he said. “I’m not sure we returned all of them to you.” I told him it was water under the bridge.

   The Lithuanian Club catered the food and drink. Vic Stankus, a long-time local dentist, and long-time friend of Romas Bublys, was eating when something went down wrong. He started choking. A man stepped up and applied the Heimlich maneuver. Standing behind the dentist he placed a fist slightly above Vic’s navel. Grasping his fist with the other hand he shoved his fist inward and upward. The deadly morsel stuck in Vic’s throat went pop and flew out of his mouth. 

   Romas wasn’t going to be buried in the All Souls Cemetery in Chardon, where many of Cleveland’s Lithuanians are buried. My father is buried there. My mother is going to be buried there. Anatanas Smetona, the President of Lithuania during the inter-war years, is buried there. Romas was going to be buried in Luksai, not far from where he was born. A year removed from passing away, his relatives will visit him, spending the day, cleaning his grave, and leaving flowers.

   The 31st of October is Halloween. The 1st of November is All Saint’s Day. The 2nd of November is All Souls Day, or Velines, in Lithuania. It has nothing to do with trick or treating. It has everything to do with not fade away. It is the Day of the Dead. Shops and schools close on the first day of November for a couple of days. Everybody heads to their cemeteries to visit those who have given up the ghost. 

   All Souls Day, also called Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, is a day of remembrance. Families visit gravesites, lighting candles on the tombs of loved ones, and soliciting for their well-being. Many cemeteries become a sea of candles at night. It is one of the most important holidays on the Lithuanian calendar. Some people pray for those they suspect are in purgatory and try to win indulgences for them.

   Velines is a Catholic observance, even though some Lithuanians who get into the spirit of it on that day are not Catholic or even identify as the same. “Vėlinės has overflowed the banks of the church,” is how one churchman has described it. All Souls Day got started in the year 933 at Cluny Abbey in France when Pope Gregory V proclaimed November 2nd as a day to pray for the departed. Lithuanians were pagans at the time and didn’t pay any attention to the news bulletin. They had their own Day of the Dead. They called it Liges. It wasn’t just one day, either. It lasted three days and nights as soon as all the crops were harvested. Life is for the living and the living need bread.

   Lithuanians were the last Europeans to abandon paganism. The cemeteries of Kernave, the one-time pagan capital of Lithuania, had always been bereft of crosses. The Grand Duchy finally gave up and accepted Christianity near the end of the fourteenth century. During the centuries they were holding out, families gathered food and gathered in their boneyards in mid-autumn. Wine and honey mead were sprinkled on graves. It was a flock together as well as an observance. Romas had always enjoyed his cocktail hour. Although a modern man, he might have approved of some ancient pagan practices, although he wasn’t the kind of man to waste a drop of distilled spirits.

   Fresh farm eggs painted red and black were left on graves as good luck charms for next year’s crops. Tables were set up. Black bread and black pudding were served. Whatever was left over was given to the poor in return for their prayers. When the three days of Liges were over, branches were culled and thrown into a bonfire while everyone sang songs for the souls of the departed. They drank whatever wine and honey mead was left over.

   Returning to one’s birthplace to spend eternity is a promised land kind of return. When Romas Bublys went back to where it all started, he was rounding a circle that is not often unbroken. Very few are afforded a resting place that is the same place where they came to life. Promised lands lie on the other side of wilderness lands.

   After the post-funeral gathering at the Church of Gesu, when I thought about memory and remembrance, about what is between the saints and the deep blue sea, I thought if there is a promised land for me on the other side of time, I will probably be the last to know. I won’t mind as long as there is a candle to light my way.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Coney Island and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, scares up the shadows.

Available on Amazon and Apple Books

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Saving Ernest Hemingway

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By Ed Staskus

   The day Frank Domscheit pulled Ernest Hemingway out of the de Havilland Rapide, the day it crashed and caught fire, he didn’t know who the man in the airplane was, although he knew who Ernest Hemingway was. He had read one of his books before the war and liked it. It was about bullfighting. The man he pulled out of the airplane was covered in blood and babbling. Frank beat out the flames on the man’s arms and hands. He pulled him away from the airplane as fast as he could. The man was big and heavy but able to stumble forward with his help.

   Frank was in the Upper Nile lands of Uganda the last week of January 1954 tending to the wife of an Egyptian businessman, getting her ready to fly back to Cairo, when Ernest Hemingway’s airplane crashed and caught fire. It was more bad luck for the writer. It was his second airplane crash in two days. The Cessna 180 he and his wife had been on the day before, sightseeing the wilds surrounding the Great Rift Valley and Murchison Falls, encountered a large flock of birds. The pilot dove to avoid them but clipped an abandoned telegraph line, lost control, and crashed. Mary Hemingway, the writer’s fourth wife, suffered two cracked ribs, and Ernest Hemingway’s head got banged hard. Roy Marsh, the pilot, was unhurt. 

   They couldn’t send a distress call. Their on-board radio was broken. They walked away from the airplane where it was wedged in scrub trees. They walked to the Victoria Nile River. When night came they built a fire. They had some apples and biscuits. They had bottles of Carlsberg beer and  a bottle of Scotch that survived the crash. The men drank warm beer while Mary eased the pain of her cracked ribs with whiskey. Elephants trumpeted and hippos snorted at the waterline.

   “We held our breath while an elephant twelve paces away from us was silhouetted in the moonlight, listening to my wife’s snores,” Ernest Hemingway said.

   The British Colonial Administration sent search planes. They found the Cessna 180 soon enough. “One wheel of the undercarriage was broken, but otherwise the plane appeared little damaged,” said Capt. R. C. Jude, the pilot of the British Overseas Airways Corporation plane that circled the crash three miles below Murchison Falls. “The chap did a neat job getting her down.” When a ground rescue team reached the airplane, however, they discovered the Hemingway’s and their pilot were not there. 

   Uganda was more than 2,000 miles from where Frank Domscheit lived and worked in Cairo. He wasn’t an Egyptian. He was a Prussian Lithuanian. He had settled in Cairo after deserting the Afrika Corps. During World War Two the Afrika Corps was the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions. There were some Italian armored and infantry divisions, as well. The Germans were highly skilled at desert tactics and noted for their esprit de corps. The Italians didn’t want to be in North Africa, surrendering whenever they could. When the British Eighth Army broke through the Axis defense lines and minefields at El Alamein, forcing General Erwin Rommel to withdraw, the war ended for Frank. The Afrika Corp went west, retreating to Tunisia. Frank went east, escaping to northern Egypt. 

   His family were fish merchants south of Klaipeda in Lithuania Minor on the Baltic Sea. They were herring wholesalers. He had been conscripted by the German Army in 1940, ending up as an ambulance driver. He served during the assault on France until France fell. After that he stayed in Paris. It might have been the best year of his life. He shipped out to North Africa in September 1941. The next year was the worst year of his life.

   Soldiers desert for many reasons, including home sickness, harsh conditions, and fear of combat. Frank deserted because he was sick of the day-to-day bloodshed. He didn’t know enough about why the war had started or why it was still going on. He didn’t disagree with German military policies or the leadership of his superiors. But he wasn’t invested in the war like they were. He didn’t care anymore. It seemed like a pointless struggle. He was sick of stitching some men up and burying the rest of them.

   When Ernest Hemingway, his wife, and their pilot were reconnoitering the morning after the crash, the writer spotted a launch on the river. “We had seen mirages when the sun got high, and at the sight of the launch, I thought, I must check my eyesight,” he said. “I called Mary and told her it looked like a launch was coming up the river. She looked and said it was.”

   The launch was the SS Murchison, the same boat that had been used in the 1951 movie “The African Queen.” It was piloted by Edwiges Abreo, a Goan from the west coast of India. “It was an excellent launch, fairly old-fashioned in lines,” Ernest Hemingway said. The captain told them it would cost one hundred shillings per person for the rescue. The writer paid the captain and they set off downriver to Butiaba on Lake Albert.

   When they got to Butiaba they disembarked and sat down under a silky oak tree to keep the sun off them. They waited for another airplane to arrive and take them to Nairobi for medical attention. It was a little-used airstrip. It was very hot and humid. When a de Havilland Rapide arrived they boarded it with their pilot and a policeman. They were near the end of the runway, a few seconds from liftoff, when the airplane hit an anthill, lost its balance, and crashed. The fuel tank exploded and they were engulfed in flames.

   Frank was watching the take-off from a thatched-roof hut. His Egyptian patient was napping in a folding canvas chair. She had fallen off a horse while on safari and hurt her head. When she didn’t improve, but rather got worse, Frank was eventually sent for. He was a neurologist, some said among the best in Egypt. He had studied medicine at Cairo University, starting before the war ended. He spoke German, Lithuanian, and English. He learned to speak Arabic. He became a doctor and trained at the Qasr El-Eyni Hospital. He was going to take his patient there for treatment.

   When he saw the airplane crash and explode he leapt to his feet and ran towards it. By the time he got to the airplane the policeman had gotten out, the bush pilot was dragging Mary Hemingway out through a broken front window, but Ernest Hemingway was trapped. The doors were jammed. He was banging on a side window with his head, trying to break it and get out that way. Frank could see that he would never get through the window frame, being too large of a man. He found a stick, jimmied the door with it, and when the door popped open, quickly frog marched Ernest Hemingway to safety. 

   He sat him down on the dry Nile mud. The writer had a scalp wound and burns up and down his arms. A part of his face was scorched. Frank found out later he had suffered a crushed vertebra and damage to his liver, spleen, and kidney. Their passports, all their money and clothes, and three pairs of the writer’s glasses were lost in the fire.

   He removed the rings on Ernest Hemingway’s fingers. He carefully cut away his shirt. He cooled his burns with water and covered them loosely with gauze. He checked him for shock, but his skin wasn’t clammy and his pulse was good. He thought the man might be in his 60s, although he seemed strong enough. He later found out he was in his 50s. His eyes were glassy. He was disoriented. There was something wrong.

   “How is your head?” Frank asked.

   “My head hurts,” Ernest Hemingway said.

   “You might have a concussion.”

   “I probably do.”

   “Have you had one before?”

   “I’ve had half-a-dozen, maybe more. I  tore my shoulder and banged my head yesterday when we went down at the falls. My head hasn’t killed me yet. I’m a writer. I need my head on straight. My luck is still good.”

   What he didn’t know was his luck was running out fast. It wasn’t ever going to be as good as it had been. His luck was getting worse and worse.

   “Do you have a headache?’

   “Yes.”

   “Are you dizzy at all?”

   “Yes.”

   “I want you to look to the right of the sun.”

   The African sky was clear and the sun was high. When Ernest Hemingway looked in the direction Frank indicated, he quickly looked away.

   “Are you sensitive to the light?”

   “Yes.”

    “Let me stand you up for a second.”

   “All right.”

   “How’s your balance?”

   “Not very good.”

   “That’s fine, let’s sit you down again.”

   “I need a drink.”

   “That would be a bad idea.”

   “My father was never the same after those two plane crashes,” Patrick Hemingway said. “When he visited me in Shimoni afterwards the atmosphere was bad.”  Patrick was Ernest Hemingway’s second son. Shimoni was a small village on Kenya’s south coast, popular with divers and fishermen.

   “It was like King Lear. He would shout, ‘What’s going on here? Aren’t I king?’” Ernest Hemingway had been a heavy drinker most of his life. He was drinking heavier in Shimoni. “I sympathized with his problems but you have to show some restraint. The last few weeks in Africa, he lost all restraint. I finally had enough. We never saw each other again.”

   The policeman who had been on the de Havilland Rapide stepped up and stopped beside Frank. He was a native. His black face was shiny with sweat. There was blood on his shirt.

    “How is he?”

   “He’s got some burns that need to be treated as soon as possible. I think he’s got a concussion. He needs to be examined in a hospital.”

   “Are you a doctor?”

   “Yes.”

   “He’s a famous writer,” the policeman said.

   “That’s what he said, that he’s a writer. I once read one of his books.”

    “I don’t read anything. I don’t know how to read.”

   A dark green Land River pulled up beside them. Two British Colonial Police Officers stepped out. Uganda was a British protectorate. They were wearing khaki jackets and short pants, black knee-high boots, black Sam Browne belts, and shiny billed black caps.

   “Is he fit enough to travel?”

   “Yes,” Frank said. “But he needs a hospital.”  

   One of the policemen led Ernest Hemingway to the Land Rover. Frank walked beside the writer, offering his arm in support. The native policeman helped Mary Hemingway into the back seat next to her husband. They were both quiet. They looked very tired.

   “I liked your book about Spain, about the bullfighting,” Frank said.

   “Thank you but I’m not getting into the ring with Tolstoy,” Ernest Hemingway said. “I love bullfighting, have for a long time. Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is always in danger of death.”

   The Land Rover took them to Masindi, which was on the road from Murchison Falls towards Entebbe. They stayed at the Masindi Hotel, the oldest hotel in Uganda. That night the bar ran short of gin while Ernest Hemingway entertained a pack of reporters with tales about his near death. “I’ve never felt better,” he said. “It’s just a bump on the head.” When they got to Entebbe he was admitted to a hospital where he stayed for several weeks. His head was leaking cerebral fluid. Doctors told him he had fractured his skull.

   Three months later Frank got a hand-written letter from Ernest Hemingway thanking him for his help. He opened it while having lunch at the Tahrir Café opposite the Egyptian Museum. He had a bowl of koshary, which was vermicelli, fried rice, and brown lentils topped with garlic vinegar. He read the letter while he was eating.

   “I want to thank you for your help, even though I can’t write letters much on account of right arm which was burned to the bone third degree and it cramps up on me. Fingers burned and left hand third degree too, so can’t type and can’t get any work done. The big trouble is inside where right kidney was ruptured and liver and spleen injured. I am weak from so much internal bleeding. Being a good boy and trying to rest.”

   Seven months later Frank was at the Tahrir Café again reading the International Herald Tribune when he saw a news item about Ernest Hemingway. He had won the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize cited “The Old Man and the Sea.”  As it turned out, it was his last novel. He never wrote another book.

   Frank bought a copy of the book and read it. He didn’t like it. It seemed solemn and maudlin. The old man was a Christ-like fisherman. The book was full of Christian symbolism. It was about redemption, as if there were such a thing. The only parts of the book he liked were the parts about Joe DiMaggio. Baseball players weren’t symbols. They were like the bullfighters in the other book he had read.

   He had seen the flesh and blood of Ernest Hemingway in Africa. The only sense of it in “The Old Man and the Sea” was the sharks who devoured the marlin the old man had landed. The book didn’t feel true to him. The writer had once been able to take the bull by the horns. He had been a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and World War Two. The writing was clear-headed and hard-eyed. Frank wondered if the man’s concussions had made him sentimental. He wondered if his pen had dried up.

   When he had been talking to Ernest Hemingway in Butiaba, leaning into the Land Rover, he heard him say, “I never knew a morning all my years in Africa when I woke up and was not happy. I’m always happy to be alive, but I’m not happy about anything else anymore.”

   It was a broken-hearted thing to say. It ached of loneliness. Frank had never gone back to Lithuania, even though he was lonely for it. He couldn’t go even if he wanted to. The Iron Curtain was securely in place. Eight years after helping save the writer, when Frank read about him again in the International Herald Tribune, he read that Ernest Hemingway had committed suicide. He wasn’t surprised. Committing suicide is braving death, although there is rarely anything brave about it.  It is a desperate act. 

   “There is no lonelier man in death except the suicide,” is what Ernest Hemingway said. It was a desperate man’s way of escaping ills that had no remedy. There were no more i’s to dot or t’s to cross.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

New York City, 1956. Coney Island and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, scares up the shadows.

Available on Amazon and Apple Books

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Paperback Yoga

One Way or Another

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By Ed Staskus

   When I was taking yoga classes I learned much about the practice, from the thinking side of it to the action side of it. It learned yoga wasn’t any one thing but many things. It was a melting pot of ways and means. The core of it was simple enough, but the branches bore investigation, from meditation to headstand, no matter how exasperating the branches might be.

    I wasn’t able to do headstand for a long time, except against a wall, until one day I was doing it, no problem. After that I flipped wrong side up at the drop of a hat. I went from hating it to loving it. When a woman toppled out of the pose and crashed into me in a class, I thought, man, what an amateur! I changed my tune when I almost killed myself trying to get a grip on handstand. I never did get the hang of it.

   When it came to the doing of yoga the instructors were all different, all sincere, all good coaches with good intentions. They demonstrated the nuts and bolts of poses. They explained the idea behind them. They helped with adjustments. They encouraged us, which was a good thing, if encouragement was what you needed. Hope and encouragement are two of the best things you can give another person. For my part, lack of encouragement has never been a problem. I am irascible enough to not care too much about sticks and carrots. I mind my own business and keep in mind what Ezra Pound said, which was, “I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible.”

   One element of studio classes always bothered me, however, which was the catch phrases the instructors used. Some lingo like drishti, bandhi, and chaturanga was helpful to know. Everything seemed to revolve around down dog and tadasana, making it easy to jump to attention when hearing those words. Lift your leg, open your chest, and bring your feet together were sensible and understandable. Most of the new age cliches, however, got under my skin.

   “Love yourself” was one of the new age cliches. I understand living in your own skin but always thought loving yourself was either narcissism or some kind of mental disorder reserved for celebrities. I sometimes thought being a celebrity might be fun because, if I was boring somebody they would naturally think it was their own fault, they being nobody’s.

   “Inhale the future, exhale the past” was another one. Breathing is breathing. It’s not a trick or a metaphor. It’s a fact of life. Breathing consciously or unconsciously, awake or asleep, running a 10K or while doing Chair Yoga, is staying alive. Not breathing for a couple of minutes is losing life’s good luck charm. As for me, whenever I feel blue I go for a walk in the Cleveland Metroparks where the breathing is free and easy.

   What did exhaling the past mean? Exhaling the past would mean puffing away everything you have learned and know. The past informs the present. The past is gone, sure, but it isn’t going anywhere. As for inhaling the future, who can wait that long? When I was on the yoga mat scuffling to keep up, I had to gulp air right now, not in the future. Besides, instructors were always saying, “Be in the present.” Today was yesterday and is going to be tomorrow soon. Every asana, which is what the poses are called, was always right now. Breathing right now is what matters, never mind the past or the future.

   “Letting go is the hardest asana” was hard to take. Nobody who has ever taken a Bikram Yoga or Ashtanga Yoga class can possibly believe this. Bikram in a sweatbox is a torture chamber and Ashtanga is simply torture. After finishing those classes letting go isn’t hard. It is the easiest most wonderful thing in the world to breathe a sigh of relief. I have seen men and women letting go at Bikram Yoga studios and never coming back. What is so hard about letting go and kicking back on the sofa with a cold one after sweating out a gallon of life’s salt water?

   “Release the toxins” was a shopworn chesnut. Hearing it always reminded me of “Release the hounds.” What if I released my toxins and they started attacking others, for God’s sake? The instructors never explained the mechanics of it, except for saying nonsense like toxins come out in perspiration. There is no such thing as toxins that come out in sweat. Anyway, if I knew how to release them, assuming I was keeping toxins prisoner in my own body, I would do so without anybody having to cajole me. 

   The maxim that dazzled and perplexed the most was “It’s all yoga.” It was like saying, “It is what it is.” When I asked what it meant all I got was well-meaning mush that implied yoga was woven into the fabric of life. The life of the Mafia or the Taliban? The life of Nazis and Commies? The zany cesspool of the NRA and MAGA? There are many monsters running rampant who think they are gods and yoga is unquestionably not in their DNA. The nut cases who spill blood at schools and shopping centers with their AR-15’s don’t have a drop of yoga blood in them. They could use it but eschew it in favor of their dark fantasies.

   Even yoga isn’t exactly yoga nowadays. It might have been in the Old World, but much of it in the New World is a hodgepodge of calisthenics, jazzercize, and core work. Some studio owners don’t even bother paying lip service to the ethical and spiritual side of the practice anymore. They have bought in to the capitalist side of yoga by endlessly promoting teacher training, which costs thousands of dollars. Bikram Yoga teacher training, lasting nine weeks, cost ten thousand dollars before Bikram Choudhury fled the country, leaving behind charges of mischief behind closed doors. 

   There are practices like Naked Yoga and We’re Stoned Yoga that have as much to do with yoga as the Three Stooges have to do with Schrodinger’s cat. “Now you see it, now you don’t,” is what the cat says. Better to sleep it off than try to figure it out, although figuring it out isn’t difficult. “A child of five would understand this,” Groucho Marx once said. “Send someone to fetch a child of five.”

   Many yoga masters, like Greg Gumucio and John Friend, oozing sincerity have been the most insincere yogis ever, opting for sex and dollars. They are always banging on Heaven’s door with news of their next Ponzi scheme, except they don’t call them schemes. They call them something like conscious surrender. It is a showboat they sail on the open river, a fishing line leading back to what they are really all about. Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters, especially when the leaders tell you their sole aim in life is to help you. 

   When I looked around the west side of the North Shore it was the haves who were enjoying “It’s all yoga” the most. Those in Rocky River had the time and energy levels. Next door to Rocky River in Lakewood, where I lived, they enjoyed some of “It’s all yoga.” The problem was their income levels didn’t match up, so they didn’t have the same time or energy. The city of Cleveland, where yoga isn’t a halo except for scattered gentrified islands, it wasn’t all yoga, at all. The streets are meaner there and there isn’t the time or money to kid yourself that classes are necessary.

   It was when the head honcho at the yoga studio I went to in Rocky River started trying to convince me I should deepen my practice by taking teacher training that I stopped taking classes there. I was in my late 50s with a bad hip and skeptical about more than a few of the claims of yoga. I wasn’t teacher material, far from it. I was more anarchist than love your neighbor. They didn’t seem to be enlightened enough to see that. I wasn’t grist for the mill, either. I didn’t have the readies teacher training would require just lying around waiting for something to happen.

   I don’t take classes anymore. I practice at home by myself almost every day. There’s nothing complicated about yoga once a few basics have been mastered. It’s easier than grafting plants or installing a garbage disposal. It has lots of benefits to it, like staying in shape and finding some peace of mind. When I get on the mat at home, I get to be me, not what somebody else is telling me I should be, using buzz words that mix up being grounded with pie on the sky.

   That’s the best thing about the practice, the freedom of it, at least once I broke free of the conceits and capitalism of yoga studios.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

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New York City, 1956. Coney Island and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, scares up the shadows.

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