Baltic Place

Stairway to Heaven

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By Ed Staskus

   Zenius Petrauskas would have traded any day in the real world, whether it was reheated meatballs with his folks the slow drumbeat of his sophomore year at St. Ed’s or hanging out with the boys doing nothing special nowhere special, for five minutes of summer camp. After the next two summers were come and gone, after his last year in Cabin 6, when he couldn’t be a camper anymore, he was determined to go back as a counselor. 

   “That’s a sure thing,” Zen said. “I’ll be on my way to being a senior by then and I’ll know a thing-or-two. I’ll be older and wiser. I’ll know how to handle the boys who are on track and off track, no wool over my eyes.”

   Camp is different than being at home. There are fewer grown-ups, which is a good thing, and nobody’s parents are there, even better. The teenage counselors are almost like the vassals. They let them run amok and hope no one dies. Everybody’s friends are together again and there are more of them than anywhere else. Nobody yells at you for two weeks. The counselors don’t like it if somebody does something stupid, but nobody gets yelled at for doing something wrong just by mistake.

   “Even when it happens, it’s all over in a minute, not like back home, where it never ends,” Zen said, looking glum. “No sir, it never ends, it just goes on and on. You’re on the bottom, mom is on top, and you’ve got to keep your trap shut.”

   The summer sky at camp is big and fresh and windy. It’s a bird in the hand. There are swallows, thrushes, woodcocks, and buffleheads. It’s in Canada, on the Georgian Bay, at Wasaga Beach, the world’s longest freshwater beach. It takes all day to drive there from Lakewood, Ohio, across the border at Buffalo, through Toronto, and to Barrie, where you take a sharp left at Lake Simcoe.

   It was never spic and span, not like the Dainava summer camp in Michigan where the Lithuanian righteous gather on their bantam pond, but clean enough. Some boys didn’t shower when they were at Kretinga and that could be disgusting, although nobody cared too much about it. 

   Somebody’s parents wouldn’t let their boy in the car when his two weeks were over, and he hadn’t showered even once. “No, go back, go hose yourself off, and brush your teeth!” his mother coughed through her nose. “What is wrong with you?” The Kretinga summer camp used to be the Ausra summer camp. In the pioneer days there were latrines but no showers. After two weeks everybody had to use a hose.

   Kretinga is named after a city of the same name, where Franciscan monks first hunkered down in Lithuania. At the time the natives were pagans. The camp is owned by the religious order. It includes a small chapel and a pet cemetery. The Franciscans have a habit of keeping a pet in their monastery in Toronto and the camp is where their dogs and cats are buried after dying.

   One year Zen’s cabin had bedbugs. The boys caught them with scotch tape and pushed them into a glass jar. Zen tried to kill some of them with poison spray, because when they sucked blood, they left itchy clusters behind, but the bugs didn’t seem to care. They shrugged the poison off. When the camp commander found out about it, he hired a sniffing dog.

   It was a Beagle, just a little bigger than Rufus, Zen’s Beagle at home. The scent hound was lean, with floppy ears and a loopy smile. He knew what was up, though, stepping into the cabin Chuck Norris in his eyes.

   He was a scent dog, not like Rufus, who was a hearing dog. Rufus heard all, searching out BS wherever it was, like up in Jack’s room. Jack was Zen’s older half-brother who thought he knew everything and talked down to him. The family lived on a better-off street in Lakewood, wide tree lawns and a concrete roadway, but Rufus still stayed on his haunches on the front lawn looking both ways, ready to bark. He knew the future might not be what it used to be. 

   The search-and-destroy flea bag was so good he sniffed out a bedbug hiding behind the plastic cover of an electric outlet. The next day everybody stuck their stuff into big black garbage bags and threw them inside the cars at camp, in the hot sun, with the windows closed. 

   All the bugs died. They didn’t get buried in the pet cemetery. Zen set fire to some of them and scattered their ashes.

   He and his friends were in the smallest of the nine boy’s cabins. The only free floor space they had was just enough to shuffle back and forth to their beds. Matias was number one with Zen. He had shiny blue eyes like buttons and was stick slender. They liked to run around, not get too uptight, and soft chill at the end of the day. They had roomed together in the same cabin for seven years.

   Lukas was Zen’s second-best friend. He was a little taller, all funny smiles and chunky. He chewed green frog gummies and spit them out on the cabin floor where they got squashed flat like pancakes. By the end of camp, the floorboards were dried goo. He was strong as a bull, but not loud or belligerent. He suffered from in-grown toenails. 

   “Don’t step on them, or else!” Zen explained to newcomers. “It can be big trouble. One night he punched somebody who accidentally stepped on his bad toe.”

   They were at the ‘Night of the Super Starz’ in the mess hall. They were sitting there watching the show when the misstep happened. Lukas stood up and pushed the boy. “Watch out, dude!” He got punched in the stomach for it. He punched him back in the face. The goat started bleating when Lukas did him. He had a bruise on his cheek and a black eye.

   There was a special midnight mass after the show, but Lukas wasn’t allowed to stay. He had to go back to his bunk, although all that happened the next day was the counselors made him sweep the mess hall. The camp commander noticed Lukas waving a broom and thought he had volunteered. He came back to the cabin with serious points pinned to his chest.

   Lukas liked being hip hop rundown. He was from Toronto and lived uptown, although Zen didn’t know where that was. He said he lived in a neighborhood of chinksters. He smoked weed sometimes, even though he wasn’t good at it. He and his dope friends went to a creek on the far end of camp one night and smoked some. He got funky and dreamed up disasters.

   “I thought I was going to die,” he said.

   Story time with Lukas at the head of the cabin was always gut-busting. When he spit out a gummy, ready to go, it was a high old time. He knew a lot of dirty jokes, too. At night they talked about movies, TV shows, and their favorites on YouTube. They talked about girls, some of them more than others. They talked about video games a lot, even though they didn’t have any at camp. They weren’t allowed. The one boy in their cabin who didn’t talk much was Titus, who they called Tits. 

   “He just sits in his corner all secluded,” Zen said. “He does play some kind of video game, so I talk to him about that, sometimes, but not much.”

   Nobody knew what was wrong with Titus. “We love Tits, but he’s quiet. He doesn’t do anything, which is the problem. At night when we’re all laying around in our cabin he’ll start crying. His eyes get soggy, and his hair tuft goes limp. He will just sit teary-eyed on his bed, looking at the floor. When we ask him what’s wrong, he says, ‘I don’t know. My head hurts.’”

   They didn’t ignore him all the time, and they never did much of anything to him. “We punch him sometimes, but not hard, just on the arms. Mostly when he’s looking, but sometimes when he’s not looking.” He got pinkeye every summer. They didn’t make fun of him about it, though. But then he got double pink eye. That was too much for everybody. They were all, “Damn it, Tits!” Everybody made fun of him, and he cried and got mad.

   The girl cabins were on the other side of the flagpoles, up a sandy hill. Amelia, who was part of Natalie’s tootsie tribe, had a reddish birthmark on her face, in the shape of a dog. Zen thought she was self-conscious about it because she always turned to her left whenever anybody took her picture, away from the birthmark.

   They never said anything about it to her. They dabbled the birthmark in their own cabin, but nothing bad, although sometimes somebody said, “What’s that thing crawling on her face?” One night, Titus was laid out on his bunk in the corner while everybody was telling home stories when out of nowhere, he said, “Did somebody have their period and rub it on Amelia’s face?”

   Everybody stopped dead quiet for a minute. Who says that? Matias looked embarrassed. Then he got mad. “Shut up!” he yelled. Zen knew his best friend had the hots for Amelia. It was a brutal thing to say, especially coming from Tits. Everybody called him that because he had them. He had always been flabby and lately was getting flabbier. 

   “He doesn’t play sports or chase girls, that’s his problem. He’s going to grow up a fatso.”

   Kajus slept in the corner opposite Titus. He thought he could play guitar, but all he did was play the same part of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ over and over. Everybody except Titus was always yelling at him to stop. Zen and Lukas finally took matters into their own hands and broke his guitar. The rest of the cabin blew off the commotion. They all knew it was a piece of junk, anyway.

   They broke the new fan his parents got him, too. Lukas was frustrated, and angry, his toes hurt, and he started taking it out on the fan. They took it out behind the cabin and beat it with a hockey stick. It was hanging on a paper clip when they were done. The spiny part was smashed, chunks were missing, but they just kept beating it. They threw bottles of water at it. Kajus wasn’t happy when he found out. He complained and gave them a sour look. He pushed the busted fan under his bed.

   When his parents came mid-week from Toronto, they asked him what happened to it. He told them Zen and Lukas did it, but they didn’t believe him. When they left, he tipped a Mountain Dew over on Zen’s bunk. Zen grabbed it and poured the rest on Kajus’s bed, pushing and shoving started, Kajus elbowed Zen, he elbowed him back harder but not crazy hard, and they both stopped when they got tired of it.

   There was a food-eating contest every summer after the ‘Counselor Staff Show.’ The small fry had to go to bed, but the boys and girls stayed up late to play the game. Whoever volunteered was blindfolded and had to eat whatever was on their plate. Everybody had to keep their hands behind their backs and lap it up like a dog. Sometimes the others puked, but Zen never did.

   There were bowls of moldy Rice Krispies with ketchup mustard strawberry jelly lots of salt and all mashed together like potatoes. It was horrible. It was like eating last place on one of his stepmom’s cooking shows on TV. Everybody cheered the belly brave and they had to eat as fast as they could if they wanted to win.

   The counselors woke the camp up every morning at seven-thirty for calisthenics. They marched everybody to the sports field and made them do a butt load of jumping jacks, push-ups, and crunches, and the boys and girls had to run the track, even though the sun was barely breaking the tops of the trees. The small fry got to do their own thing, whatever that was.

   If the counselors saw somebody was slacking, they made them do more. Everybody jumped on the used tire jungle gym and messed around whenever they could, having fun. The counselors made whoever overstayed their welcome do pull-ups on it, but it was a small price to pay.

   “We get up every morning to music,” Zen said. “It’s always Katy Perry or Duck Sauce, or whatever the big cheeses want, played from loudspeakers hidden in the trees. Sometimes I don’t hear anything because I’m dead asleep. The counselors carry water blasters. If they say you have twenty seconds to wake up, and you don’t jump right out of bed, they start spraying you. They shake your bed and jump on you, but they’re always on the way to the next bed, so it doesn’t last long.”

   After they were done exercising, they went back to their cabins, cleaned up, and raised the flags before breakfast. There are three flags, American, Canadian, and Lithuanian. “But sometimes we’re too tired to clean up and instead fall back asleep in our cabins and are late for the flag-raising. When that happens it’s time to swallow the pill. Whoever is late has to step into the middle of everybody on the parade ground and do the chicken dance. All the boys on their side of the parade ground do the chop, swiveling their arms like tomahawks and chanting. Nobody knows what it means. They all do it, and the girls stand there watching. Then they do their own dance, like cheerleaders, except they aren’t cheering for you.”

   All the cabins had to keep a diary for the two weeks of camp. Everybody got graded on it every day. If anybody wrote something stupid, like “Ugi Ugi Ugi” or anything that didn’t make sense, they got a bad grade. The counselors told them to “Be yourselves, be sincere.”

   “What does that mean?” Lukas asked, but they just laughed.

   Matias always wrote their diary because everybody agreed they were all retards. Titus wrote something dumb once, even though he said it was sincere, and at the flag lowering that night they had to do the Rambo, running down the slope to the flagpoles with no shirts on and singing “Cha Cha Cha” while everybody did the chop. That night, in the middle of the night, they rolled Tits down the same slope wrapped up in a scratchy old blanket.

   They wrestled in the oldest boy’s cabin. It was the biggest cabin, too, so it had space for fighting. They moved the beds and duct taped a sleeping bag to the wood floor. There was no punching allowed, no hammer blows, but kicking and throwing each other on the ground was fair game. They weren’t supposed to fight, because the camp commander didn’t like it, but everybody wrestled and got poked bruised blooded.

   One night at their Wrestlemania, Donatas and Arunas were locked up when Donny grabbed Arnie’s head and flipped him over. Arnie slammed hard into a bedpost and got knocked out. They let him lay there, but when he didn’t wake up, even though they screamed in his face, they threw wet dirt on him. He jumped up and was fine after that.

   The next day they were walking to New Wasaga Beach, which is where the whole camp went every afternoon for a swim, and Arnie jumped on Donny’s back and almost cracked it. But they didn’t punch each other. It was just a couple of seconds of retaliation. They weren’t haters. Besides, the counselors were watching, and that would have been trouble. They always said, “Only we can get physical.” The grown-ups stood near and far in the water and made sure nobody drowned. The boys and girls and small fry never noticed. They were busy splashing swimming splurging in the sunshine.

   Every year another year went by and when Zen was back at camp it was like he had never left. As soon as he got there, he unloaded everything he’d brought, his clothes flip flops sleeping bag. All his stuff had his initials written on it with a Sharpie. Everybody found their cabins and claimed their beds, and then all the parents were gone before anybody knew it. 

   They saw their friends again, everybody in their cabin, and everybody they had ever camped with. “What’s up dude!” There were high-fives knuckle-touches bro-hugs all around. They fake punched each other and laughed it up.

   They reunited with the girls and got overdue squeezes from them. When all the moms and dads that nobody in his right mind thought about from that moment on were gone, they had sandwiches in the mess hall. The priest said a prayer and the camp commander made a speech. He wrote the camp rules in big block letters on a chalkboard.

   He was big on shaming boys but not girls when his rules were broken. There was a bonfire most nights. They acted out skits, sang songs, whooped it up, but if you were on his list, he called you out in front of everybody and you had to try to explain why you did what you did when you did it. Most of the time the explanations were lame as diarrhea. Zen believed in never explain, never complain, although it was hard facing a determined grown-up.

   The best night of summer camp was every night, but the best night was the night they played their manhunt game. Sometimes it was called ‘Fugitive’ or ‘Stealing Sticks’ or ‘Capture the Flag.’ It was always the same, although it was always different. Lukas told everybody he saw a movie about Jews battling Nazis in Warsaw, chases in the dark ghetto and shoot-outs, but nobody could understand what he was talking about. Nobody else had seen the movie. 

   Lukas said, “Let’s play it that way.” 

   Everybody said, “OK, that’s what it is.” They were the good guys, and the counselors were the bad guys. Some of the counselors thought it was sketchy but didn’t disagree. It was as much fun as ever. It was like ‘Bunnytrack’ with no holds barred. 

   Tits never played, and he didn’t play ‘Nazis and Jews,’ either. He said it was wrong and started explaining about Lithuania, where their parents and grandparents were from, and how terrible things had happened there. He said it was a holocaust, not a fun run around, but they told him to shut up, and he got sulky. Nobody knew what’s wrong with Titus. Zen knew what was wrong with him. 

   “Titus knows he’s low man on the totem pole and nobody cares what he says.”

   The game started when the counselors led them to the mess hall. They turned the lights off and made everybody sit on the damp concrete floor. After they left it got super quiet. It was eerie. When the counselors came back, they were dressed in black, charcoal from the cold bonfire rubbed on their faces. They split everybody into groups and spit out the rules. They had to find books and save them from being burned. They weren’t real books, just pieces of paper. The more papers they dug up the more Liberty Dollars they got for the next day’s auction. The more of them in their group who got caught the more their Liberty Dollars were taken away.

   The papers were scattered around the camp in the hands of three counselors, who were hidden in the woods, and who kept moving around. They had to find them and when they did, they were supposed to hand over the prize. But sometimes they had to beg them for it. Other times they had to fight tooth and nail for the paper.

   If the counselors who were the Nazis caught anyone, they took their papers away, ripped them up, and it was back to square one. Many of the boys and girls hid them in their shoes, or their underwear.

   “It gets dirty, in more ways than one,” Zen said. “The dirtiest I got was when I was by myself, not far from the sports field, but on the edge of the woods. One of the counselors came walking past and I dropped flat fast. I lay in a bunch of leaves, twigs, mud, bugs, worms, and moldy stuff and he just walked right past me.”

   Anybody could try to get away when the counselors caught somebody, but it’s hard to do because the ones who catch you are the strong ones, while the other ones can’t catch a breath. The strong ones don’t like it when anybody makes them look bad by breaking away. It doesn’t matter what the other ones think. The bold could try to break free when no one was looking, but if they were captured, they had to stay even longer in the lock-up. The more sitting the less chance there was to win Liberty Dollars.

   Matilda, who played for a college basketball team, decked Zen, blind-siding him out of the blue, just when he thought he was home free. At first, he wasn’t sure what happened. When he got up, he tripped her, and started running away. When she caught him, he fell on the ground like he was wiped out. She was forced to drag him by his arms and legs. While she was dragging him, he noticed a large lump on her chest. When he asked her what it was, she gave him a sly look.

   “It’s a tumor,” she said. “I have cancer.” 

   “I couldn’t believe it. She seemed so healthy. I jumped to my feet so she wouldn’t have to drag me. While we were walking the tumor started to jerk back and forth. I didn’t know what to do. Was she going to die? Then, just as we walked into the lock-up, her baby gerbil poked its head out of her bra.”

   One summer the lock-up was inside the art house, where supplies and costumes are stored. It’s at the farthest end from the sand dunes. Makayla was the guard, and although she wasn’t musclebound, she was strong and determined. There were two rooms. She had to patrol them by herself.  She carried a broom, pacing back and forth, her head swiveling in all directions. Everybody had to sit in straight chairs and be quiet. If you talked too much you had to stay longer. If you got up from your chair you had to stay longer. If you messed with her in any way at all you had to stay longer.

   Campers could try to escape, but it wasn’t easy. Makayla would hit you, not hard, but hard enough. She hit everybody with her broom, although usually with the soft twine end. But when anybody got nervy, she jabbed the broom handle down on them and yelled, “Shut the hell up!”

   It was not a good idea to try escaping too many times, because if anybody tried a couple of times and they caught you both times, they would kick you out of the game. It wasn’t fair, but that’s what they did if they got annoyed about it. If you sat there quietly and sweet-talked Makayla, “I’ll be good,” she would smile and let you out before the others. 

   That’s what Zen did. “I was good. I play it smart. It’s the only way.”

   He broke off from his group right away. He had planned to run with his Cabin 6 friends, anyway. They made it to one of the storage sheds and hid there, catching their breath, and then started running around. They searched for the counselors with the scraps of paper and dodged all the others.

   “The counselors are fast,” Zen said. “Make no mistake about it. They aren’t sludges and even the sludges have some fast up their sleeves. The girl counselors can catch you if you don’t see them right away and they are sprinting straight at you. You can push them away, but not punch them, although you can punch them, just not all of them, only the ones who don’t care. Your friends can help you, and if the counselor is alone, you have a good chance of getting away. He can’t catch both of you at the same time, no matter how big and fast he is.”

   The counselors tackle hard when they want to. They can be bottle rockets and they don’t mess around. If somebody is your cabin’s counselor, they’ll cut you some slack. They’ll use you as a distraction. The trick is to act like you’re getting caught when somebody else is walking by, yelling, “Help me!” Then your counselor will throw you to the side and get them, instead.

   Another summer the lock-up was the boy’s bathroom. They took out the light bulbs. It was dark dank soggy clammy. There was only one door, so it was hard to escape. They had to sit in there with the bad smells and daddy long-legs crawling all over them. Titus stayed snug in the cabin with a package of Oreos.

   The summer they played ‘Nazis and Jews’ the lock-up was on the edge of the sports field under a pole lamp. It was a pressboard box used to store basketball backboards. The box wasn’t big, the size of a dining room table, but high and deep going backwards. The counselors squeezed them in, and then made more of them stand in the middle. They nailed two-by-fours to the sides so they wouldn’t spill out. Everybody was packed in like rats. Somebody could try to crawl out, but they would have already gotten you by then, dragging you back.

   All of Cabin 6 escaped when counselors nabbed a pack of new runners and were bringing them in, but there wasn’t any space because it was so crowded. They got pushed sideways to make room. They had a couple of seconds of daylight. There weren’t enough counselors to grab everybody, so they ran into the woods to the Hill of Crosses.

   It was on a sandy knoll modeled after the Hill of Crosses in Lithuania. One of the crosses was the Ateitininkai symbol and one had fallen over. Nobody knew what the other ones were about. Everybody’s parents knew all about the crosses. It had something to do with their past, the old country, where there are tens of thousands of them on a big hill in Siauliai. 

   They went there sometimes at night for horseplay. It was secluded and private. Everything has its good points, Zen thought. When some of their dry as tinder crosses caught fire the Wasaga Beach Fire Department had to drag their spray hoses to the knoll and take care of business.

   They were cutting through, talking about what they were going to do next, when Lovett the Loose Goose, who was fit and fast, jumped out of a sand dune. He was waving a flashlight like a crazy man. Somebody smashed into him. He singled out Nojus for it, running after him. Everybody flipped, scattering, none of them going the same way.

   Dovydas sprinted to the border of the camp where there was an old crappy barbed wire fence. It was his first year at camp and he didn’t know it was there. When he tried to jump it, he got tangled. He ended up stuck, his t-shirt ripped, and his hands scratched. He couldn’t get off the sharp wire.

   After they found each other, they saw Lovett again with his flashlight. He was still looking for Nojus. Everybody lay down in the sand, quiet as moles, and he ran right past them. They stayed behind a little hill where they usually hung their clothes after coming back from the beach, and later snuck back into Cabin 6. All of them were sitting on their beds, laughing it up in the dark, when Nojus started freaking out.

   “See what happens,” Titus said.

   Nojus was so worked up and down at the mouth he got on his knees, put his hands together in front of his bunk bed, and started praying. He was praying out loud, crying, and saying “I don’t feel good” when the Loose Goose walked in with the flashlight stuck in his back pocket.

   “What’s wrong with him?” he asked.

   “I don’t feel good,” Nojus said, walking outside the cabin and throwing up. He tried to throw up in a bin, but his aim was way off. The next morning, everybody heckled him about it, but all he wanted to say was he just didn’t feel good during the manhunt and didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

   Zen almost broke his neck playing that night. It happened when Big Al started chasing him. He was ripped out of his mind and jacked up. He climbed trees and survived out on the tundra. Zen had been jogging lazily away from Ned, who was a lard and slow, when Big Al jumped him. Zen screamed and went into adrenaline mode. When he saw Big Al’s even bigger girlfriend waiting at the fork in the path, he sprinted the other way into the woods.

   He got away clean, but it was when he lost them that a madman came out of nowhere and found him. Ginty was wearing a bandana and waving a basketball in his hands. Zen knew he was going to throw it straight at his shins, because that’s what he was doing to everybody. It was a basketball he had inflated crazy hard. He could sling it like a lightning bolt. It smashed boys on the legs. Runners were face planting and giving up.

   Zen was running all out and jumped when Ginty threw the ball. He jumped right into the low-lying branch of a pine tree. It bruised him, a branch raking across his neck. It felt like his main man artery was going to pop.

   “That really hurt!” Zen cried out. “I kept running, but I was suddenly scared, so I stopped. My neck was gashed and bleeding, but not gushing blood, thank God. When Ginty found me, he took his bandana off and wrapped it around my neck.”

   “You’ll be fine,” Ginty said.

   “Then he grabbed me and tried to drag me to the lock-up. You can always trust a counselor to be a sly dog. But I got away. I kept the bandana wrapped around my neck so he couldn’t track me down by any drops of blood. I made sure the Liberty Dollars I had collected were still in my pocket. I slept with them curled up in my fist and my fist tucked under my pillow.”

   The next morning, he ran to the front row of the manhunt auction. The camp commander stood at a podium with a wooden mallet. There was a pegboard behind him full of a boat load of the things everybody might get, and everybody started bidding. There were t-shirts and baseball hats, breakfast in bed, and true-blue God-fearing counselors having to clean your cabin.

   There was stargazing with a girl cabin of your choice.  But Zen put everything he had on the first shower of the night. It was the day of the big night at the end of camp dance in the mess hall and he wanted to look his best for it. He made sure nobody outbid him because it was do-or-die for the hot water.

   You got to shower first, all by yourself, for as long as you wanted. The camp commander posted a counselor to stand guard at the door and they didn’t let anyone in except you. It was only you and a bar of soap, and you could gush as much of the hot water as there was. There was only so much of it at camp, the tanks not being the best or biggest, and you could take it all. Everybody else was left with cold leftovers.

   “Oh, yeah, that’s what you always do, because everybody else would do it to you.”

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Ebb Tide

End of the Marco Polo

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By Ed Staskus

   Kieran Foyle, Jr. was 21 years old the day the Marco Polo was run aground by its captain at Cavendish. She was a three-deck three-mast clipper ship built at Marsh Creek in Saint John, New Brunswick 32 years earlier. During its construction the frame got loose in a storm and was blown all over the shipyard. The skeleton had to be reassembled. After the shipbuilding was done the launch didn’t go well. The ship grazed the bank of the creek while sliding down the slipway, got stuck in a mudflat, and went over on her side. A week later a high tide lifted her up, but she got stuck in the mud again. Two weeks later she finally floated free and was fitted with rigging.

   The ship carried emigrant men and women from England to Australia for many years. She set the world’s record for the fastest voyage from Liverpool to Melbourne, doing it in 76 days. More than fifty children died of measles on her maiden voyage and were buried at sea. Coming back, she carried a king’s ransom in gold dust and a 340-ounce gold nugget. The nugget was a gift to Queen Victoria from the colonial government, although she wasn’t able to pull rank and keep it under her mattress. Gliding into its home port, the ship unfurled a banner claiming it was the “Fastest Ship in the World.” Cannons boomed black powder discharges on her arrival.

   The gold dust and the big nugget were delivered to London by a fast coach guarded by a company of the King’s Men. There wasn’t going to be any Great Coach Robbery. They unloaded it at the Bank of England. One man after another carried the loot inside and stashed it in the vault. When they were done they locked it up tight and posted a sign saying, “Keep Out.”

   During the many gold rushes Down Under the ship carried boatloads of standing room only men to Australia. Nobody died of measles, although some of them died of moonshine. Fire is the test of gold. Many of the men died of typhus, what they called ship fever, burning up in their hammocks in the South Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, and Tasman Sea. Many of the original settlers laying claim to aboriginal land, the oldest, flattest, and driest inhabited continent with the least fertile soil anywhere, got there on the Marco Polo. 

   When she was retired from the passenger trade, she was refitted for the coal, timber, and bat shit trade. It was rough going. The hull was rotting and wasting away. Chains were wrapped around it and drawn tight trying to keep it together. A windmill-driven pump was installed to send leaks back where they were coming from.

   It was a late July morning, clear and sunny after the storm that had driven the ship to Cavendish. Kieran Jr. was in the dunes watching the crew wade ashore. They had been on the way from Montreal to England loaded with pine planks when they got caught in a gale. They plowed ahead but started to take on water. Two days later wind and waves were still pummeling them and they were still taking on water. The ship was flooding and the hands couldn’t plug the leaks fast enough. The windmill fell over and the pumps gave a last gasp. Captain P. A. Bull decided to save the crew and cargo. He put the clipper into full sail and wheeled it straight at Cavendish’s sandy beaches.

   The closer they got the better their chances looked until, three hundred feet from shore, he ordered the rigging cut. The masts groaned ,wanting to snap, and the bottom of the ship scraped the bottom. Everybody stayed where they were, staying awake all night, until dawn when the storm finally wore itself out and they rowed ashore. 

      Lucy Maud Montgomery was a pale 8-year-old girl, her long crimson hair in braids with choppy bangs, when she and everybody else in Cavendish watched the crew abandon the ship. She wore a white flower hairpiece on one side of her head and took notes on scraps of paper. Nine years later her short story “The Wreck of the Marco Polo” was published. 

   She wrote, “The crew, consisting of 25 men, found boarding places among the settlement and contrived to keep the neighborhood in perpetual uproar They were lively times for Cavendish The crew consisted of Norwegians, Swedes, Spaniards, Germans, and one Tahitian.” They were tough men. It was the beginning of the Tahitian’s second sea voyage. He was barely half-tough but looked more red-blooded than he was. He was speckled with tattoos and wore his hair in long braids tied up at their ends with small fishhooks.

   Kieran Jr. was hired by the salvage company stripping the ship. It was welcome work coming before harvest time. As soon as they started on the grounded vessel, another storm rolled in. Kieran Jr. was on the ship and had to stay where he was. Trying for the shore was too dangerous. They battened whatever hatches were still left and spent the night being battered. Captain Macleod and a rescue party from French River showed up the next morning. The wind beat him back the first time he tried to reach the Marco Polo, but he made it the second time, saving all the men except one. He and his crew got gold watches for their efforts. Kieran Jr. went home wet as a wet dog.

   He didn’t go home empty-handed, though. There were twin figureheads of Marco Polo adorning the ship. A man from Long River hauled one of them away and hung it in his barn. Kieran Jr. hauled the other one away and hung it in his barn. It was the end of the road for the many parts of the far-ranging ship.

   He was back on the ship two days later as the salvage work went apace. He was taking a break on the poop deck, leaning against a gunwale above the captain’s cabin, when a young dark-skinned man joined him.

   “I am Teva the Tahitian,” he said. “We are dead in the water.”

   “I am Kieran the Foyle,” Kieran Jr. said. “We are alive on the shore of the water.”

   Teva was the only one of the crew who signed on to help salvage the ship. The rest of them stayed in Cavendish drinking and chasing farmgirls. The Tahitian and the Irishman worked together for the rest of the week and into August. Teva told Kieran Jr. he was putting his purse together to get to Maine and sign on as a whaler.

   “My grandfather Queequeg was a harpooner,” he said. “He was the best in the world. You could spit on the water, and he could split your floating spit from the deck with one throw. He shaved with his harpoon and smoked from a tomahawk. He was a cannibal, but his favorite food was clam chowder.”

   “He was a cannibal?” Kieran Jr. asked, taken aback. 

   “Him, not me,” Teva said. “I don’t eat my own kind. I never met him, but my father told me about him before he went whaling. He never came back, either.”

   “They both went to sea and never came back?”

   “Both, never. A friend of my grandfather’s stopped on our island when I was a boy and told us about what happened to him. The man who stopped was a white man. His name was Ishmael. He and grandfather sailed and slept together.”

   “Slept together?”

   “In the morning his arm was thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner,” is what Ishmael said. “You had almost thought I had been his wife. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian, I always say.”

   Teva asked Ishmael what his grandfather had been like.

   “There was no hair on his head, nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead, large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had a creditor. His bald purplish head looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. His body was checkered with tattoo squares. He seemed to have been in a war and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his legs were marked, as if dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms.”

   Teva lapped up water with his hands from a barrel, gulped, and spat on the deck.

   “Grandfather saved Ishmael’s life when their ship was head-butted by a white whale they were hunting. The coffin they had built for him when he was dying during the hunt was thrown overboard and Ishmael hung on to it like a buoy. He was the only sailor who survived when Captain Ahab, the crew, my grandfather, and the Pequod all sank to the bottom.”

   “I must ask, since your father and grandfather both went whaling and never came back, why are you going the south way to take up whaling?” Kieran Jr. asked.

   “It’s in my blood,” Teva said. 

   Every day when the day was fair and the sun shining, families picnicked on the beach at Cavendish, watching launches with two-masted ketch rigs go back and forth, taking what they could to Alexander MacNeill’s for auction. It was a Sunday when Sinbad the Sailor walked up to Kieran Jr., looked him up and down, and meowed. “They say our boat had no rats the whole last year,” Teva said. “This cat drove them off and those who thought they could stand up to him, they disappeared.” Teva tossed a piece of salt pork at Sinbad, who snagged it midair and gulped it down.

   Sinbad was a two-tone Norwegian Forest cat. “One of the Vikings brought him aboard,” Teva said. He was a twenty-pound bruiser with long legs and a bushy tail. His coat was a thick and glossy with a water-repellent top layer and a woolly undercoat. It was thickest at the legs, chest, and head. His ears were large, tufted, wide at the base, and high set.

   “He’s a good climber, very strong,” Teva said. “He can climb rocks and cliffs.” When he leaned on Kieran Jr. and reached up while stretching, flexing his front legs, his claws extended themselves slightly. They were sharp as razors. Kieran Jr. rubbed Sinbad’s head. 

   “He’s big enough to be a man-eater,” he said. “What’s going to happen to him when our work is finished?”

   “I don’t know,” Teva said. “The Viking left him behind.”

   That evening, when Kieran Jr. was walking back to the rude shelter he had thrown up for himself behind the dunes, Sinbad followed him. He put a bowl of fresh water out for the cat but left breakfast, lunch, and dinner up to him. He was sure Sinbad was not going to starve. The cat was a vole, shrew, deer mouse, snowshoe hare, and red-bellied snake widow maker. Even racoons, foxes ,and coyotes gave him a wide berth.

   Sinbad went back and forth to the ship with Kieran Jr. the rest of the month and the next month while the vessel fell apart piece by piece until a thunderstorm barreled up from the United States and finally finished it. The ship broke up along the coast, going down to the bottom of the sea. It was the end of the Marco Polo. 

   When Kieran Jr. packed up his bedroll and shelter and walked home, Sinbad walked beside him the five miles back to Foyle’s Cove. Kuloo watched them from on high. He sized the cat up. The cat was like him in many ways. Biddy and Kate were shucking oysters on the porch overlooking the cove, a pot at their feet. The oysters were from Malpeque Bay. Hundreds of boats big and small were in the fishery there and at St. Peter’s Bay. Until the 1830s oysters were plentiful but few people ate them. They were often spread over land as fertilizer. The shells were burned, too, for the lime they produced.

   After the Intercolonial Railway got rolling in 1876 new markets for Prince Edward Island oysters opened in Quebec and Ontario. But oyster stocks started to fall and kept falling as more boats joined the harvesting. Oysters fled for their lives. They didn’t like being eaten alive. Biddy and Kate didn’t give much thought to overfishing or the deep-seated fears of shellfish, so long as they got their fair share.

   “Oh my gosh, what a beauty!” Kate exclaimed when Kieran Jr. walked up to the porch with Sinbad beside him. 

   “He came here on the Marco Polo,” he explained. “The ship broke up yesterday in the storm and he needed a new home, so here he is.” Sinbad walked straight past the girls to the pot and started pulling oysters out, gulping them down without a single word of thanks.

   “Hey, stop that,” Biddy scolded, covering the pot. “You’ll ruin your appetite, silly goose.”

   Sinbad’s ears pricked up. He had taken a goose for dinner last Christmas. It had been delicious. He shot a look in all directions. He didn’t see any birds, but had no doubt there had to be one or two nearby somewhere. He was by nature a nomad, but as there was a pot full of oysters and slow geese to eat, he thought, I’ll stay for the time being.

   He was a back door man, but when the front door was wide open, that was the door he always went through. God might or might not believe in destiny, but he was only a cat and didn’t know anything about divine inspiration. He didn’t believe in the garden path, but when the living was easy in the summertime, that was the way he went.

Excerpted from the book “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at 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.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

A Prince Edward Island Thriller

“A stem-winder in the Maritimes.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CVDP8B58

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. One RCMP constable stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

West Park Blues

Going for Broke

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By Ed Staskus

   The good times Maggie Campbell and her sisters and brother had when they were kids were always the day after their family fights, which were always the day before a holiday. Christmas Day was fun happy joyful because it was right after the Christmas Eve scrape. All the presents under the tree didn’t hurt, either, so long as they hadn’t been busted in the melee.

   The fights happened before or on the dot of the holiday, never afterwards. On Easter, the 4th of July, and Thanksgiving there was always a knockdown. Alma or Fred, their parents, or both at the same time, would start the drag down. Afterwards the family pulled it together for the holiday, to look good for the big day. They had to look better for their friends, neighbors, and in-laws.

   One Christmas all their cousins from Pennsylvania, Maggie’s relatives and all their kids, were at their house in Bay Village. The house was warm and cozy and there hadn’t been any fights. They were all looking good. It was an unusual holiday. It couldn’t last. It didn’t last.

    It was Christmas Eve morning when Eric from Philadelphia passed gas. “Oh, that’s a wet one,” somebody said, and that started the whole thing, which turned out to be the flu. It went from Eric to Curtis to Kim and Skip and the rest of them. Everybody barfed and barfed for days. Alma was beyond mad. She was beside herself. She wanted to go to a hotel, even though she was a nurse. She would have jumped ship if she could have, but Fred made her stay.

   Every 4th of July there was a street party. They lived on one of the only two cul-de-sacs in Bay Village, a bedroom town west of Cleveland. In the morning all the kids would decorate their bikes and they had a bike parade. Their parents judged the bikes and handed out prizes.

   They played games all day and later in the afternoon everybody’s parents carried their grills and picnic tables to the end of the street for a party. They had food soda chips and the grown-ups had coolers of beer. When the kids had soda pop they burped as loud as they could. The beer drinkers burped despite themselves. Everybody partied and had a great time.

   Maggie’s mother wore a t-shirt that said “JOE BALLS” on the front and “FROM NEWTON FALLS” on the back. It was a family joke. They had an uncle named Harold who lived in Newton Falls, but everybody called him Joe Balls. Nobody knew why. 

   One summer a waterspout off Lake Erie touched down during their street party. They were out in the street playing. Their parents were close to trashed. When Maggie ran into the house to tell her mother, she said, “Go back out there and play.” But they ended up having the rest of the party in the garage once she saw what was going on outside the window.

   Alma became a nurse when Maggie was in 5th grade. She had four kids and a husband in the house but before anybody knew what was going on she decided she wanted a career. Fred’s parents put her through nursing school, paying for it all. She studied at Tri-C and went to work at Lakewood Hospital. When she became a nurse, she wore a t-shirt that said “THE PUSHER” because she was an IV Therapist. She was the one who loaded the tubes with drugs.

  It was the same year, when Maggie was at Normandy Elementary School, during the Miracle of Richfield, that she got a pair of tennis shoe roller skates. They had a teacher at school named Mr. Barton and he loved to hoe down dance and dribble basketballs at the same time. He taught them to do it and they got so good at it that they were invited to perform at a Cleveland Cavs game.

   It was the year the team was scrappy and good and played the Washington Bullets in the conference finals. The stands were crazy loud. Fans wore earplugs and the players on both benches stuck their fingers in their ears.

   “The Washington series was the greatest sporting event I will ever see in my life,” said Bill Nichols, who covered the series for The Cleveland Plain Dealer.  “We want the Cavs! We want the Cavs! We want the Cavs!” the fans screamed. It was a thunder dome. Three of the games were decided in the last two seconds. The chanting was so loud that the chalkboard Cavalier Coach Bill Fitch used to diagram plays shook in his hands. “A couple of players had to hold it down,” star guard Austin Carr said.

   “If you don’t drop your ball, or double dribble, or anything else helter-skelter during the performance, I’ll buy you whatever you want,” Maggie’s dad told her. She told him she wanted tennis shoe roller skates. “Whatever you want,” he said.

   They were colossal that night doing their hoe down dribble dance at halftime at the Richfield Coliseum, which isn’t there anymore. It’s just a big empty field full of stink weeds now that it’s been torn down. They danced to “Saturday Night” by the Bay City Rollers.

   “ S_A_T_U_R_D_A_Y!”

   After she got them, Maggie lived in her purple roller skates from that day on. She put them on first thing in the morning and skated all over the house. She did axles in the streets and figure skated every day in her rollers. She went to the roller rink every chance she got. But she wasn’t allowed to wear them in school, no matter what she said. Even so, she wore them all the time until she got her first pair of high heels.

   “The roller skates came off right after that and I’ve never been out of high heels since,” she said. “The reason is that I stopped growing when I was in 6th grade. After that I found out I was going to be short. My mom was a pygmy, although I had three or four inchers on her. She got shorter the older she got. Everybody else in our family was taller than me. My dad was six-foot-something. I was the shortest of all the kids, shorter even than my little brother Brad.”

   Her mother got Maggie a pair of Candies Heels. They were plastic made to look like wood and had a strap across the top of the foot that stopped about mid-way up. A girl could wear them with anything, shorts, skirts, and disco pants. They were the hot shoe. Every girl had to have a pair.

   “You’re going to be in these for the rest of your life,” her mom told her. “You will never get out of them.” She made Maggie practice walking in them, up and down the driveway, then up and down the street, and finally up and down the stairs. “You don’t want to walk like a clod,” she said. “A lot of girls stomp in their high heels, but you’re going to walk like a lady.”

   It got so she could run in them fast. She could chase dogs. She was still speedy enough when she grew up, not as much as she had been, but still fast if she had to be. Years later she ran in a high heel race down the middle of Lake Rd. in Bay Village. She wore a hot pink tutu and didn’t come in last. She didn’t know who invented high heels, but thought women owed the man a lot. “You put high heels on, and you change. Everything is different in them. Your body moves to a new kind of tempo.” 

   When she got her Candies Heels her favorite things in life were summertime funny TV shows boys barbeques dogs and shoes. She loved dogs the most, but shoes were a close second. They couldn’t lick up your face with slobber and love, but they could kickstart your new lady legs.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Ebb Tide

No Stone Unturned

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By Ed Staskus

   When JT Markunas checked the weather report it looked like the outdoors was going to be in the 20s and sunny. It had been in the 20s and sunny yesterday, too. It was mid-summer. Sitting on a lawn chair outside his rented house in Milton he thought the forecast was like the murder he had been investigating on-and-off the past few months. It wasn’t any different today than it had been yesterday and looked like it wasn’t going to be different anytime soon.

   The difference was nobody could do anything about the weather. The RCMP could do something about the murder. They knew how the woman with the empty briefcase had been killed but didn’t know where or why. They still didn’t know who she was, nor did they have a clue about who might have done it. The more days went by the more it got pushed back in everybody’s minds. It was starting to go unresolved and cold.. Nobody had seen or heard anything the past fall and by the time anybody knew something had happened, winter was over and it was spring. Now it was summer.

   It was a hell of a shame, he thought. Nobody should get away with murder. Murders are often a spur of the minute violent outburst, but what happened in Conor Foyle’s field wasn’t a mistake. It was deliberate. It rankled him to think whoever did it thought they could get away with it. It was usually some poor slob who couldn’t get away with jaywalking. They got locked up. The rich hired somebody to talk their way out of it. They walked away free. JT thought what happened had to involve money, and lots of it. The rich didn’t brandish axes to get what they want. They had fountain pens for that.

   An execution is justice, but murder is injustice. There was no justice in taking the law into your own hands. There was money in farming and fishing, which Prince Edward Island did a lot of. Farmers and fishermen rarely shot each other, or anybody else. At one time lenders got rough when it came to collecting from debtors, but that time was gone. Criminal gangs shot first and didn’t ask questions whenever they were crossed, but there were no criminal gangs like that on the island. There were some with criminal minds. That’s why the force existed. He thought it likely that whoever did the killing was a lone wolf. That meant whoever it was, was likely to keep to themselves. Whoever it was, he was going to be hard to find. JT wasn’t holding his breath. He was a patient man, though. He believed he would get his man eventually.

   It was going to be a tough nut to crack but it was a nut that would have to keep. It was his day off. He tossed his bicycle into the back of his pick-up. The bike was a Specialized Rockhopper, nothing special, but virtually indestructible. It went up and down potato roads and single tracks just fine and rode smooth enough on pavement. Brackley Beach was about 20 kilometers away. He drove there.

   JT parked at the west end of the beach. It was 15 kilometers to Dalvay By the Sea. He was going to keep going another 5 kilometers farther on to Grand Tracadie, stop and stretch his legs, and ride back. Forty kilometers in the saddle would be enough for him. When he started the wind was at his back and the living was easy, until he realized it would be in his face on the way back. He thought he would find somewhere in Grand Tracadie to have a bite and a drink before turning around.

   He rode past the Harbour Lighthouse, some cottages, Ross Beach, some more cottages, Stanhope Beach, Long Pond, and stopped at Dalvay By the Sea. He rode to the front steps, parked his bike, and walked down the sloping lawn to a set of red Adirondack chairs in front of the big house. He was sitting there looking out at the ocean when somebody walked up and asked if he would like tea and biscuits.

   “Make it black tea and butter for the biscuits,” he said. He need not have asked for butter. If there was anything homegrown plentiful on the island, it was homegrown butter. There were enough cows in all directions that everybody on the island could go on an all-butter diet if they wanted to and there still wouldn’t be a shortage. There would still be plenty to export.

   Dalvay By the Sea was a big house and seasonal rooms. Before becoming lodgings, it was only a house. The Gilded Age industrialist Alexander Macdonald, who was an American, built it just before the end of the 19th century on grounds of 120 acres. The lower half of the house and all the fireplaces were island sandstone. Windmills supplied power and water. He kept horses and carriages and a cohort of grooms to look after them. He and his wife entertained all summer when they weren’t riding their horses and at the end of every summer hosted a lavish dance for the locals. They were like patroons from an even earlier  age.

   By 1909 Alexander Macdonald was dying. At the beginning of that fall he stood on Long Pond for the last time staring at his house. He missed it already. He knew his heirs were spendthrifts and nothing good would come of them or his house. He died the next year. After his children squandered the family fortune the house was sold to the man who had been tending it. William Hughes had asked the family what should be done with the 26-room mansion. They said, “You can have it for the back taxes.” He bought it and all the furnishings for less than $500.00. Fifteen years earlier it had cost more than $50,000.00 to build. The furnishings were gotten during family travels to France and England. They were transported to Prince Edward Island by ocean steamer. Nobody knew what it had all cost. William Hughes turned around and sold the house for a handsome profit. The last owner went broke and sold it to the government in 1938, which turned it over to Parks Canada, which under a concession had been operating it for the past fifty years as a summer hotel.

   JT finished his tea and biscuits, saddled back up, and buckled his helmet. Before he got started, he saw two young women on bicycles going his way. They were noodling it. He rode past them giving them a friendly wave. They waved back. He thought they were both good-looking, one more than the other. He had a job, a house, and a bed, but he didn’t have a girlfriend. His job was the problem. The job was a Catch-22. Most of the women he met who liked policemen, he didn’t like them. Most of the women he liked, they didn’t like policemen.

   There wasn’t much other than houses and fields in Grand Tracadie. He rode as far as MacDougalls Cove and turned around. At first, riding back to Brackley, the breeze was at him from the side. Once he got back on the parkway, though, it was in his face. It wasn’t a windstorm, but it wasn’t a gentle breeze, either. He dropped his bike into a lower gear and plodded on. He rode the bike for fun and fitness. The ride back to his pick-up was going to be about fitness.

   He had just passed Cape Stanhope when ahead of him he saw the two young women he had seen earlier on their bicycles. It almost looked like they were riding in place, although he could see they were peddling. He was thirty-some yards behind them when a red motorcycle went past him fast. He had barely heard the motorcycle and was taken aback when it zipped by him. It was going 140 KPH for sure, maybe faster on a road where the speed limit was a third of that. When it passed the women the rider wiggle waggled his motorcycle at them and flashed away. The women were riding on the shoulder. The one closest to the road got shaky and see-sawed, lost control, and fell over. She bounced, her arms outstretched, and bounced again sideways into the sand. The other woman stopped and ran back to the fallen woman.

   If he had been working traffic enforcement in the Mustang Police Interceptor he could have caught the motorcycle, maybe. It had to be a Japanese bike. They made the quietest motorcycles. He hadn’t gotten the plate, but he knew high-tech when he saw it. It looked new and was probably faster than his Ford Mustang Interceptor. He stopped where the fallen woman was rolling over and sitting up. Her hands and forearms were scraped and bleeding. She had broken her fall with them. Both of her knees were scraped and bleeding, one of them worse than the other. He put his hand on her shoulder and pressed her back down when she tried to stand up. “No, don’t do that,” he said. “I’m with the RCMP. Stay where you are.” He turned to the other woman.

   “Don’t let her get up until I come back. It should just be a few minutes.” Some gulls flew up from the beach to see what was happening. They made a choking ha-ha-ha sound. After they saw there was no food to be had, they flew away.

   He rode back across the bridge the way he had come, turned down Wharf Rd., and stopped at the first deep-sea fishing shack at  Covehead Harbour where he saw somebody working. He telephoned for an ambulance and rode back to the two women. They were where he had left them, except a man and woman had stopped to help. Their Ford Taurus was half on the road and half on the shoulder behind the women, its flashers blinking. The man was Barry MacNeil and his wife Gloria.

   “We saw it happen,” Barry said. “That jackass must have the brain of a paper cup. If he had done something like that on the track, there would have been hell to pay, believe you me.”

   An emergency truck from the North Rustico Fire Department arrived and carried the injured woman away. The other woman went with them. Barry put their bicycles in the trunk of his car, securing the trunk with a bungee cord.

   “I got the address where to take the bikes,” he said  “She’s got road rash all over and there’s something wrong with her leg. At least they won’t have to shoot her.”

   JT stopped at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital the next morning. It was almost new, the biggest hospital in the province, having replaced two smaller and older hospitals seven years earlier. He was told the woman had been treated and released.

   “Is she an islander?” he asked.

   The woman at the desk said, “I don’t know, but she lives here in town.”  An islander was anybody who had been born on Prince Edward Island. The designation was closely watched. When a woman who had been brought to the province from elsewhere as a baby died 90 years later her obituary in the newspaper read, “Woman From Away Dies Peacefully in Her Home.”

   Some said you had to be conceived on the island to make the grade. A boy living in Souris was flummoxed when he found out he might not be an islander, even though both his parents were, and he was born on the island. It turned out he was brought into existence on an impulse in a dark corner of the ferry crossing the Northumberland Strait. “He was not conceived on the island so he’s not an islander,” his uncles and aunts said, their noses out of joint. His parents took the matter to his father’s father. 

   “It all depends on whether the ferry was going away or coming back,” the boy’s grandfather said.

   The fallen bicyclist’s name  was Kayleigh Jurgelaitis. JT got her address and went to work. After he was done wasting his time arresting a teenaged dishwasher smoking pot behind an all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant, he clocked out at the end of the day, changed his clothes, and went looking for the address. He didn’t have far to go. She lived near Holland College. It was a two-year trade school, home to the Culinary Institute of Canada and the Atlantic Police Academy.

   He recognized the friend when she opened the door and she recognized him. When Kayleigh limped out of a hallway into the living room, she was limping up a storm.

   “How’s the leg?”

   “Better than yesterday, believe it or not. I couldn’t even walk. You’re the cop, right?”

   ”Constable.”

   “Right.”

   “So, what happened to your leg?”

   “They said I have a slight meniscus tear in the knee,” she said, sitting down and elevating her bad leg. “I’m supposed to keep it elevated and put ice on it every couple of hours. They think I should be back on my feet in a week or two.”

   “I’m glad to hear it. So long as I have it on my mind, did either of you get the license plate of that motorcycle?”

   They both said no.

   “Neither did I,” JT said. “He was too far ahead and it happened too fast. We might be able to find him, but probably not, except maybe by accident.”

   “If I never see him again it will be soon enough,” Kayleigh said. “I wouldn’t mind seeing him lose his license.”

   “I couldn’t help taking notice of your name,” JT said. “Are you Lithuanian?”

   “Yes and no,” she said. “My mother was Irish, from here, and my father was Lithuanian, from there. I’m half of the one and half of the other. Why do you ask?”

   “Because my name is Justinas Markunas,” he said, explaining he went by JT.

   “I was wondering if I was the only Lithuanian on this island among all the Irish, Scots, and the Acadians,” Kayleigh laughed. “Now I know there are two of us.”

   “Spud Island is immigrants through and through,” JT said. “Everybody here came from somewhere else. I’ve run into a few Jews, some Swedes and Hungarians, not to mention the Mi’kmaqs. There aren’t many of them even though they were here first. I’ve even heard some Asians are thinking of setting up a Buddhist community in Kings County, which will probably make everybody’s heads spin when they do their chanting.”

   Before leaving, pausing at the door, he asked, “Since it seems it’s just the two of us on the island, we should have lunch or dinner sometime and toast our native selves.”

   “I think I might take you up on that,” Kayleigh said. “In the meantime, I’ll keep my eye out for the Tasmanian Devil on two wheels.”

Excerpted from the book “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, out of the past, a double cross, and a fight to the finish.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Paperback Yoga

Wear and Tear

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By Ed Staskus

“When I get older losing my hair, many years from now, will you still be sending me a valentine, birthday greetings, bottle of wine?”  The Beatles

Every so often a yoga magazine website feature article speaker at a seminar blog FB Instagram Huffington Post will trot out the oldest yoga teachers in the world as examples of what can be accomplished when the body mind and spirit are all set firmly on the practice. They extol their example. They direct our attention to them, pillars of light.

The old-timers are shopworn though not the worse for wear, faded, but still lit up, the sparkle of the light of yoga still in their eyes.

There are the Big Three, gone but not forgotten. K. Pattabhi Jois kept at it to the age of 93, B. K. S. Iyengar, 95, and Indra Devi, an astonishing 102. There are many people in their 50s who say they just hope to make it to retirement age. Indra Devi not only never retired, she died still in the saddle.

The yoga teacher and scholar Krishnamacharya, known as the “father of modern yoga,” started in the mid-1920s and inspired a new interest in the practice. He taught and worked at it until the day he fell into a coma and died in 1989. He was 100 years old. It’s too bad he never knew he made the century mark.

Only .01% of anybody lives to be one hundred or beyond. Those that do often credit diet, exercise, and environment. Not always, however. Edith Atkinson Wylie, a 106-year-old living in Montana, who has never done a minute of yoga in her life, credits her longevity to “bourbon and Cheetos while watching the 5 o’clock news. And good genes, too.”

Edith played the gene card. She had to, otherwise forget shouting “Bingo!” The pay-off was another glass of bourbon and somebody else’s bad news on the TV.

“Do be do be do,” Frank Sinatra sang. He didn’t make it. Not that he didn’t try, wig and all.

There’s one in every crowd, especially the 100-year crowd, who have earned whatever eccentricity they want to play up to. Edith probably wears white gloves out in public, but the liver spots still show through. Don’t argue with the 100-year crowd though. They’ll see you in the grave first.

Besides the Big Three, there are the second stringers who accomplished the same longevity.

Nanammal, born in 1919, was the oldest yoga teacher in India. Her father taught it to her when she was 8 years old. She went on to teach more than a million students over 45 years. She died late last year. Tao Porchon-Lynch, born on a ship in the English Channel in 1918, also discovered yoga when she was 8 years old. She studied with Jois and Iyengar. She was a model and actress in the 40s and 50s but in the 1960s went into yoga full-time, teaching right up to her death early this year. She was 102.

Ida Herbert, born in 1916, hit it big as the oldest yoga teacher in the world in the Guinness Book of World Records. She was 96 years old at the time. When she turned the corner on the century mark, she was still teaching a group of older women she called “Ida’s Girls.” She didn’t get into yoga until she was in her 50s, taking private lessons, reading books, and practicing on her own. She started teaching yoga at the local YMCA. Everyone was drawn to her feisty energy and repeated message to “keep moving.”

When she died in April of this year, she was 103 years old. Her ashes were scattered at “Ida’s Rock” on the lakeshore where she lived. The wind blew them into the water.

The reason the 100-year crowd gets demonstrated is because there are more old older oldest people in the world now than ever before. The planet’s population is ageing faster than in the past. The number of people 60 years and older today outnumbers children younger than 5 years. Between now and 30 years from now, the proportion of the world’s population over 60 years will nearly double from 12% to 22%.

125 million people are aged 80 years or older today. By 2050, there will be almost this many in China alone, and 434 million people in this age group worldwide. It is why yoga has significantly expanded in the past ten years. 30 to 49-year-olds are still the group doing it the most, but the numbers show that it is growing exponentially in popularity with those over 50 60 70 and 80. Adults over 50 practicing yoga tripled from 2014 to 2018.

“Let go of excuses that you’re too old,” says Carol Krucoff, a yoga therapist at Duke Integrative Medicine in Durham, N.C., and co-author of “Relax into Yoga for Seniors.”

“You don’t have to be young or fit or flexible to try yoga. If you can breathe, you can practice it,” she said.

About a million-and-a-half people live in nursing homes in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 10 million more, mostly 65-or-older, need long-term support to help them with daily activities, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. They are all breathing, but it’s a moot point whether they can totter forward to a yoga mat and get going into one asana and another.

“Age is an issue of mind over matter,” said Mark Twain. “If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

Mind over matter is a great concept, but sometimes, no matter how much you don’t mind, it does matter. When you can barely shuffle forward in a walker, and barely breathe doing it, it is more likely a matter of matter over mind. It matters getting started, but sometimes the starter motor has gone bad.

Yoga studios are a business, and most yoga teachers are free agents, and everybody has got to make a living, so it is being touted as the new remedy for whatever ails golden agers. We age as the result of the accumulation of molecular and cellular damage over time. What happens is a downgrade in physical and mental capacity, a growing risk of disease, and ultimately, death.

Why it’s called golden is anybody’s guess.

Mental capacity and physical fitness are the bedrocks of yoga. It is what yoga teachers are best at doing, getting people fit and thinking straight. That’s why if senior citizens can get there, the mat is good for them.

Yoga has a lot to do with death, but nobody wants to hear about that, no matter what the Dalai Lama says, which is, “Awareness of death is the very bedrock of the path. Until you have developed this awareness, all other practices are useless.”

That’s all well and good for him, given his beliefs. He is thought by Buddhists to be able to choose the body into which he is reincarnated. That person then becomes the next Dalai Lama. Most people in the United States either never give a thought to the afterlife, are on the fence about it, or don’t believe in it.

It’s now or never.

Yoga in the main is recommended for seniors, a tonic that reduces stress, improves sleep, lessens depression, takes the edge off aches and pains, and enhances balance, flexibility, and strength. It is also said to help prevent the onset of osteoporosis, which causes bones to become weak and brittle. Most oldsters practice one or more of several popular versions, Restorative, Yin, Hatha, and Iyengar. If they can’t get up and go, they do Chair Yoga.

The AARP is on board with yoga for seniors. They say it protects your joints, which by your 60s aren’t as fluid as they used to be. “It’s important to start caring for your joints, to help maintain your independence and preserve your ability to perform daily activities as you get older, things like brushing your teeth, combing your hair, getting dressed,” says Amy Wheeler, yoga professor at California State University at San Bernardino.

It builds strength and better balance, helping prevent falls, which are the leading cause of injuries among oldsters. “About 80 percent of proprioception is in your ankles, so standing poses are important, particularly for people in their 70s,” says Larry Payne, yoga director at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. “As you get more sedentary, your sense of balance atrophies. ‘Use it or lose it’ really does apply.”

It sharpens the mind. As we get older, our thought processes aren’t as keen anymore as they used to be. We get addled, disoriented, at sea. The Babadook in the closet is Alzheimer’s. Almost 6 million Americans age 65-and-older are living with it in 2020. Eighty percent are age 75-or-older. One in 10 people age 65-and-older has dementia.

A 2016 International Review of Psychiatry study reported that practicing yoga relaxation techniques for 30 minutes a day had immediate beneficial effects on brain function. “Focusing on the breath and synchronizing it with movement helps keep the mind clear and engaged,” says Melinda Atkins, a yoga teacher in Miami.

If worse comes to worse, there’s always Corpse Pose, which is good for any age. Lie on your back, eyes closed, splay your feet to the sides, arms alongside your body, palms facing up, surrender to the floor, and breathe deeply evenly consciously.

Seniors being old-timers, they’ve got to be careful, even doing something as bathed in the virtuous glow of yoga. “In general, older adults have less joint range of motion, less strength and poorer balance than younger men and women,” says Gale Greendale, a professor of medicine and gerontology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “They also have more limiting musculoskeletal conditions, such as osteoarthritis and low back conditions, that may put them at higher risk of musculoskeletal side effects from yoga.”

In other words, they can get hurt.

“There were 29,590 yoga-related injuries seen in hospital emergency departments from 2001 to 2014,” according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. “The trunk was the most frequent region injured. The injury rate increased overall from 2001 to 2014, and it was greatest for those aged 65 years-and-older compared with those aged 18 to 44 years and 45 to 64 years in 2014.”

In the six years since, injuries among seniors have shot up as their participation in yoga has shot up.

As good as yoga is for everybody, including everybody war-horse age and up, it isn’t the whole pie, but rather a slice of the pie. Investing in it to the exclusion of other kinds of activity and movement is pie in the sky. There is more to move mind spirit than plank down dog and half-moon pose.

“Yoga goes a long way for the mind and spirit, but a little bit of it goes a long way for the body, especially as we get older,” said Frank Glass, a former sportswriter who covers the yoga scene in the metropolitan Cleveland, Ohio area. “I get on my mat at home most days and sometimes I take a class at Quiet Mind, but I’ve adapted as I’ve gotten older.”

Quiet Mind on the east side of Lakewood, one of Cleveland’s inner ring western suburbs on the Lake Erie shoreline, is owned and operated by Barron Cannon, a yoga idealist and sometime anarchist who still manages to turn a profit at his studio.

“I don’t stand on my head anymore, and I’ve put wheel pose away in the garage,” said Frank. “What I do now is a blend of yoga, Pilates, and band work. I walk in the park, walk on my treadmill in the winter months, and work out on a Concept 2 rower.”

Like many people, Frank Glass started taking yoga classes in his early-50s. “I played too much racquetball and squash in my 30s and 40s,” he said. It took a toll. Playing got painful. Playing got impossible.

“The problem with relying on yoga was that the better I got at it the worse I got at real life. Not mentally or spiritually. I got better there. It was the physical part I got a little disenchanted with. Less is more, as far as I’m concerned. Walking, biking, rowing, lifting weights, or band work, is just as bottom-line as sun salutations”

There is wide agreement that along with yoga, activities like walking and cycling, aerobic classes, bodyweight training, and resistance band workouts are especially well-suited for mossbacks. Swimming is encouraged because it is often called the world’s perfect exercise.

“Getting in the pool is a great way to increase your cardiovascular fitness while also strengthening your muscles,” says Victoria Shin, a cardiologist at Torrance Memorial Medical Center in California. Exercising in water puts minimal stress on your bones and joints, which is a plus for anyone who has arthritis or osteoporosis. It hydrates the moss. The Journal of Aging Research suggests that swimming keeps minds as sharp as it does bodies fit. It’s like doing yoga with your yellow rubber ducky.

Many studies of healthy older people indicate that strength, stamina, and flexibility drop significantly after age 55. These declines were once considered an inevitable consequence of aging. Not necessarily anymore.

But a study by Harvard and Tufts researchers showed that many functional losses could be reversed. “In the study, 100 nursing-home residents, ages 72 to 98, performed resistance exercises three times a week for 10 weeks. At the end of that time, the exercise group could lift significantly more weight, climb more stairs, and walk faster and farther than their sedentary counterparts, who continued to lose strength and muscle mass.”

“I may not live to be a hundred, although my father was in his late 80s when he died, and my mother is still kicking around in her 90s, so I think my genes are on the better side, which gives me a chance,” said Frank Glass. “So, I’ll just keep doing what Mr. Natural does.”

Fred Natural, known as Mr. Natural, is a slightly overweight bald man with a long white beard wearing a sack making him look like a prophet. He is a comic book character created by the 1960s underground cartoon artist Robert Crumb. Fred was once kicked out of heaven for telling God it all “looks a little corny up here.”

His goal in life is to “Keep on Truckin’.”

Although he has much in common with the Big Three, there is no recorded instance of Mr. Natural ever doing yoga, even though he is approaching 150 years of age. Knowing him, he probably kept it a secret. Wherever he is today, on a remote island or mountaintop, he would certainly recommend doing some yoga and would absolutely recommend staying on the move. He has a nimble way of saying, “Use it or lose it, baby.”

It’s the only way to get in with the 100-year in-crowd. And since an apple a day keeps the doctor away, when you’re done with whatever you’ve done, on the mat or off, have a big slice of apple pie. And a glob of ice cream. It goes great with a slice of pie.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Cross Walk

Shake Rattle and Roll

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By Ed Staskus

   On Monday morning the weather was good, in the high 50s, with no rain predicted the rest of the week anywhere east of the Mississippi River. It was the first of October. In two weeks to the day, it would be Dwight Eisenhower’s birthday. In six weeks to the day, it would be Mamie Eisenhower’s birthday. The presidential election was coming up fast. “We Like Ike” was the word of the day.

   By the time the sun was up Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower had been awake more than two hours. They arrived at the Terminal Station in Cleveland, Ohio, riding a 12-car campaign train on an overnight run from Washington. The Terminal Tower’s office building foundations were 250 feet deep. More than a thousand ramshackle buildings had been demolished making space for it in 1924.  When the ribbon was cut in 1927 it was the tallest building in the world outside of New York City. The first Nickel Plate Railroad train pulled into the station two years later to hurrahs.

   The station was in the prime of its life, but Dwight Eisenhower was putting intercity train travel and Cleveland’s Terminal Station, and all of its kind, slowly but surely out of business by federally subsidizing a network of interstate highways. “Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him,” the president explained, without a doubt in his mind about the right-of-way of his road project. It had been in the back of his mind since the Louisiana Maneuvers in 1941. It was after his United States Army trucks got stuck all over the place because of the country’s bad roads that he said to himself, “We need better roads.”

   The Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Public Square, across the street from the Terminal Tower, glistened in the early autumn sun. The fire department had spray cleaned the monument over the weekend, showering it with hundreds of gallons of white vinegar, and then hosing off the bird droppings and grime. The hometown vermin didn’t appreciate it, but what could they do? They didn’t pay taxes or vote and so they didn’t count.

   The monument was built thirty years after the Civil War, a 125-foot granite shaft on top of a square base housing a memorial hall, larger than life bronzes lining the outside, and marble tablets inside with all the names of the more than nine thousand Union soldiers from Cuyahoga County, the county in which the city lay, who didn’t come back from the war with Johnny Reb. Most of them stayed where they fell.

   “Good morning, Mr. President,” said Robert Bridle, manager of the Hotel Cleveland. “Good morning, Mr. Mayor,” he said again, turning to Anthony Celebrezze, the city’s mayor. The manager’s mouth puckered like a kiss when he said “morning.” The Hotel Cleveland was shaped like an “E” opening onto Superior Avenue. The one thousand rooms were built in 1918 by the Van Sweringen brothers, who built the Terminal Station ten years later.

   Anthony Celebrezze was a Democrat, mayor of the fifth-largest city in the United States. He knew how to get things done. Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, meant the keys to the federal purse-strings to him. He was going to try to loosen those strings. He knew it was a fight to the finish with every other city in the country. He knew how to roll with the punches if he had to. 

   The mayor’s father had been a shepherd in Italy, and then a track laborer on the Wheeling and Lake Erie after he emigrated to the United States. Tony Celebrezze put himself through John Carroll College by working as a truck driver and a boxer, beating the other’s guy’s brains out for peanuts in bitter undercards. The peanuts paid his school tuition.

   Dwight Eisenhower was giving a speech in the hotel to the faithful that day, taking a short break, and then giving another speech in front of Higbee’s beside the monument to friends, enemies, and the lunch crowd. Downtown Cleveland was spic and span. The commander-in-chief liked what he saw. The dummies in the window of a clothes shop on Euclid Avenue came to life and waved when he and Mamie passed by. He tipped his hat to them, smiling his trademark smile. He liked the mime.

   It was noon on the dot when he greeted more than nine hundred invited guests to the Sales Executive Group Luncheon in the Main Ballroom. He spoke briefly, shook hands with every extended hand, walked out of the hotel, and threw at look at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. He strode up some stairs to the speaker’s platform. He was giving his second speech of the day at twelve-thirty.

   He was in the middle of two months of pressing the flesh, kissing babies, and giving the same stump speech day after day. His mouth had gone dry as a bone, and his palms had gone chapped. Flecks of baby spit littered his suits. He often had to rub somebody’s dandruff out of his eyes. It had gotten so he could tell the state anybody lived in by their body odor. When he looked, a dozen black and white Cleveland Police cars blocked off Euclid Avenue, Ontario Street, and every other street in sight.

   The rats Bert, Mert, and Luke scampered out of the Memorial Room of the monument to its roof, stopping at the base of the polished black stone column. They could have climbed to the top of the column, one hundred and twenty-five feet to the top, wending up the six foliated bronze bands listing the names of the thirty battles in which soldiers from Cuyahoga County fought, if they wanted to. Their eyesight wasn’t the best, not like their sense of smell, but their perch today was more than view enough, so they stayed where they were. 

   Since it was only a month to the election, Dwight Eisenhower got right to the point. “The opposition say that they alone truly care for the working men and women of America, and that Republicanism is a vague kind of political conspiracy by big business to destroy organized labor and bring hunger and torment to every worker in America,” he said to the overflow crowd. 

   “That’s right!” a loudmouth yelled from the front of the crowd. “The working man ain’t got a chance.” A Secret Service agent made his way through the crowd and stopped behind the man, watching his hands.

   Secret Service agents watched from the roofs of the May Company and Higbee’s, and from inside the twin steeples of the Old Stone Church. The Berea sandstone of the church had long since turned black from pollution wafting up from the Flats, the nearby industrial valley that sprawled along both banks of the Cuyahoga River. The sun twinkled on the terra cotta façade of the May Company. The faces of shoppers were pressed against the upper story windows of the department store, watching the soapbox serenade below them. 

   The pastor of the church across the square sat in a lawn chair outside his front doors, his sleeves rolled up, warm in the warm October day. He had a ploughman’s sandwich, cheese and pickles, wrapped in wax paper in his lap. He unwrapped his sandwich. He took a bite and chewed methodically. The sky over Public Square was dappled with small clouds. He stretched his legs out. His father had been the pastor once. He grew up in the Presbyterian church. He served on all the church committees, was a volunteer at all the events, and made all the hospital and home care visits. Thank God for Dwight Eisenhower, he thought, basking on a rare day off.

   Bert and Mert were Tremont twins. Luke was an orphan. He didn’t know where he came from. All his friends called him Eaka Mouse, even though he was a rat. The three friends usually slept during the day and foraged at night, avoiding owls, but this was a special occasion. They had never seen the top dog of the Grand Old Party up close. The birds were staying away because of the hullaballoo, but the rodents couldn’t contain their curiosity.

   “This is more than political bunk,” Dwight Eisenhower declared. “Those men are fretting fear and worried doubt. It is wicked nonsense. We have given to our nation the kind of government that is living witness to a basic virtue in a democracy, public morality, public service, and public trust. There is no special favoritism, cronyism, or laxity in our administration.”

   “That’s what they all say, “somebody bellowed from the middle of the crowd. Another Secret Service agent drifted his way.

   Luke had the best sense of smell of the three of them. He led the way when they went searching for food, which was fifteen and twenty times a day. Their favorite foods were seeds and grains, which made the monument an all-day dream diner for rats. It was visited by hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, many of whom left behind crumbs of whatever they were snacking on. The pickings today were going to be out of this world.

   In the wild the rats were vegetarians, but city life was different. They ate almost anything they could get. None of them liked cheese, though. No rat they knew liked cheese. They laughed at the traps filled with shavings of it. They weren’t looney tunes. They could smell the hand of man on carefully prepared bait cheese and knew to beware well enough.

   “The men of the opposition know perfectly well that one of the main reasons they were thrown out of office four years ago was their tolerance of the fire of inflation,” Dwight Eisenhower said. “Just in the final seven years of their tenure of office this economic fever had cut the value of the dollar by almost one-third, damaging the livelihood of the aged, the pensioned, and all salaried workers.”

   “What about the Bonus Army?” an old voice at the back called out. “Whadda ya got to say about that?” The Secret Service ignored the elderly man shaking his cane in the air.

   Luke had recently chewed up a front page of the Cleveland Press for bedding. He noticed a feature article about last month’s government index showing living costs had shot up to a record high. “The cost of living has been remarkably stabilized,” Dwight Eisenhower in his everyman’s brown suit earnestly proclaimed, “During the previous Democratic administration, the cost-of-living increase was twenty times as great.”

   Mert gave Bert and Luke the high sign. The rats had heard the grift and swindle of the campaign trail before. Shills came to Public Square all the time to spread their lies. The speechifying was making them sleepy. It was a lot of cutting corners and trying to corner the other guy. The three rodents stretched, groomed themselves briefly, curled up together, and were soon napping.

   Dwight Eisenhower wrapped up his speech, stepped down from the platform, and was in his limo in his motorcade on its way to Cleveland Hopkins Airport by one o’clock. He and Mamie boarded the Columbine and were airborne to Lexington, Kentucky by one-thirty. In two days, at about the same time of day, he would be tossing out the first pitch of the 1956 World Series at Ebbets Field instead of tossing out half-truths. There wasn’t much fresh air in New York City, but he would enjoy what he could get.

   The rodents ate most everything edible but avoided ice cream. They loved Canadian bacon more than anything. Most days, except Sundays, as long as the weather was good, they looked forward to the nut lady, the woman who looked more-or-less like Doris Day and Mammy Two Shoes rolled up in one. She was a middle-aged Slovenian woman with dark skin, dark hair, and dark eyes, She worked across the street from the square, at Morrow’s Nut House, near the revolving doors of the May Company. She brought them bits of bacon mixed with nuts when they took their mid-day break on the steps of the monument.

   The nut lady worked behind the display case at Morrow’s, selling warm and lightly salted cashews and redskin peanuts, Spanish peanuts, almonds, hazelnuts, pecans, and oily rich walnuts. Morrow’s Nut House was on the corner, on the intersection, behind a CTS bus stop where passengers lingered while waiting for their ride. The shop pumped the smell of roasting nuts out onto the sidewalk all day long.

   Bert, Mert, and Luke weren’t waiting for her today. There was a horn of plenty waiting for them on all sides of the Sailors and Soldiers Monument. Who said the Republican Party never did anything for the little man? They were ready to like Ike at a minute’s notice. But they had better things to do with their time. They were their own men. The three rats had girlfriends, Mary, Suzy, and Perla, waiting in the wings, ready to make nice.

   The faithful and the feckless dispersed when the talking was over. The lunch time office workers went back to work. The shoppers went back to the stores. The loafers went back to loafing. Only the loafers knew the country had the best politicians money could buy. They knew the only difference between the political parties was that Republicans excelled at raking in the greenbacks.

   “Hey guys, let’s shake it up,” Bert squeaked. “It’s time for the submarine races.” Eaka Mouse knew exactly what Bert meant. It was juice it up and hanky-panky time. They weren’t three blind mice, not now or ever.

   “Come on, snake, let’s rattle.”

Excerpted from the crime novel “Cross Walk.”

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

Paperback Yoga

Breathless (All’s Well That Ends Well)

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By Ed Staskus

America’s greatness is premised on open competition and the profit motive, in other words, capitalism. In the past the fundamentals of capitalism were production and trade. In the modern world the keystones are CEO’s, movie stars, and sports.

Competitive sports hew to the original and still abiding spirit of capitalism, which is that everybody loves a winner.

Sports are an essential avatar of capitalism. That is why they are more popular than, say, ballet or book clubs. “Sport is a capitalist competition,” said the philosopher Ljubodrag Simonovix, a former star player for the national basketball team of Yugoslavia in the 1970s.

“It corresponds to the market economy and the absolutized principle of profit.”

But, sports matter in America not because of their impact on regional and local economies. In a society that is individualized and even to some extent atomized they generate expressions of enthusiasm and unity in their communities.

The professional sports sector represents annual revenue in the range of $50 to $80 billion in the United States, according to the International Association of Sports Economists. This is in an economy that’s almost $15 trillion in size.

“It’s a very small part of the economic output of the United States,” said Andrew Zimbalist, Professor of Economics at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. “One can easily explain the interest in having professional sports teams as primarily social and cultural in nature. People in America certainly enjoy and love sports.”

A widespread adoption of yogic principles would throw sports for a loss, since an essential component of the practice is non-competition. For example, tapas, one of the niyamas, refers to “keeping the body fit, or to confront and handle the inner urges without outer show,” writes William Doran in The Eight Limbs. It doesn’t mean being fit so you can slam-dunk or stiff-arm someone in your way. Instead of grasping after Lombardi trophies and big paydays, yoga’s physicality is wedded to its philosophy, intended for the expansion of awareness and consciousness.

Hatha yoga is non-competitive. The practice is personal, played out within the individual, not played on a team on a field facing an enemy opponent. The Bhagavad Gita, an epic poem from the second century BC often cited within yoga culture, is about this cognitive orientation, and whether the struggle to make sense of the world is primarily an internal or external one.

Yoga is a collaboration of the body, mind, and spirit. Sports are a zero-sum game. There are no winners or losers in yoga. There are only winners and losers in sports. Yoga is first and foremost about a specific person pursuing the practice. Sports are always about the “other” through whom one is defined.

“The only things that matter in yoga practice are you, exactly as you are right then, yourself, your breath, your thoughts, and if you are practicing on one, your mat,” says Heidi Kristoffer of Strala Yoga in New York City. “To be sure, no one else matters.”

Sports are always about the short-term goal of winning right now. No one loves a loser. Yoga is about folding all its aspects into the broader tradition of self-inquiry.

Not only would the nationwide practice of yoga probably obviate sports, emptying our arenas and stadiums, and KOing up to $80 billion in economic impact, it would knock the legs out from an enterprise that underscores many of the premises that gird our society. Without the lure of winning and the goad of failure, sports would cease to be relevant. If sports became irrelevant in America, capitalism itself could become the next victim.

Capitalism is the great engine that drives the United States. It was in America in the latter half of the 19th century that “the tendencies of Western capitalism could find fullest and most uncontrolled expression” writes the economic historian William Parker.

Capitalism’s basic characteristics are the private ownership of the means of production, social classes organized to facilitate the accumulation of profit by private owners, and the production of commodities for sale. All capitalist economies are commercial, although not all commercial economies are capitalist.

I own, therefore I am, is the sound bite of capitalism.

The United States is a commercialized society. The creation and expansion of the modern business corporation is one of our most notable achievements. In America economic power dominates. We conceive of ourselves as producers and sellers. As such, this makes for several problems. “In a productive society the superiority of things produced is the measure of success. In a commercial society the amount of wealth accumulated by the dealer is the measure of success,” wrote the English historian and social theorist Hilaire Belloc.

Capitalism is as much, if not more, about amassing wealth as it is about serving men’s needs.

“Capitalism has turned our society into a commercial society, a society inclined to measure everything by a money standard,” writes Thomas Storck of the Center for Morality in Public Life. “Our modern world, and especially the United States, has elevated the acquisition of wealth to such a point that it tends to distort almost all social relations. Capitalism, the separation of ownership from work, of economic activity from serving man’s needs, is at the root of this.”

Capitalism’s problems are many, including that it tends to degrade the conditions of its own production, constantly seeking to increase profits. It works to expand without end in order to fulfill its reason for being, justifying all the means at its disposal to monopolize its market. Lastly, it polarizes the rich and poor, a process in the United States that has accelerated since the late 1960s. According to the Census Bureau the common index of inequality in America rose to an all-time high in 2011.

The yoga project does not reject goal-oriented activities or success, nor concern with outcomes. It does reject focusing on outcomes.

“Money cannot buy me everything, “ said Swami Tyagananda, the head of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society in Boston. “It can buy me ‘stuff’ but not happiness, peace of mind, or a loving relationship with my family and friends, and stress-free life. If success is measured not simply in terms of wealth, then one’s life becomes more meaningful. If my answer is only in terms of dollars, then I am in trouble.”

Commercial activities, sales goals and success, profits and wealth building are not in and of themselves anathema to yoga. Rejecting success and the fruits of success are not its mantra. However, the competitive pressure of making more and more money, always maximizing the gap between cost and price, focusing on extracted profits as a matter of life and death, which are central to capitalism, are contrary to the maxims of yoga.

“Selfishness is the root of all bondage,” wrote Swami Vivekananda.

Santosha, one of the niyamas, means to take from the marketplace and life only what is necessary, not exploiting others. “It means being happy with what we have rather than being unhappy about what we don’t have,” writes William Doran in The Eight Limbs. Aparigraha, one of the yamas, counsels possessing only what we have fairly earned, not hoarding our possessions, and letting go of attachment.

“If we take more, we are exploiting someone else,” writes William Doran.

Capitalism is inherently exploitive, as seen through the lens of the labor theory of value, a view supported by both classical economists like Adam Smith and radicals like Karl Marx. The practice of yoga neutralizes the desire to acquire and hoard wealth. The ultimate aim of capitalism is to make 100% profits, or, in other words, get everything in exchange for nothing. The goal of yoga practice is to get nothingness, or the here and now right now, in exchange for everything.

According to the Bhagavad Gita yoga practice is not about gaining material ease. The ultimate purpose of yoga is consciousness.

“When the consciousness moves towards an object, that is called bondage,” wrote Swami Krishnananda in The Study and Practice of Yoga. “Consciousness should rest in itself. That is called freedom.”

If yoga were to attain widespread currency in the United States capitalism would come under severe scrutiny and risk collapse as a way of life, throwing the economy completely off kilter, cutting off at its roots American exceptionalism.

The United States has survived many threats since the founding of the republic 200-some years ago, from anarchists to terrorists and civil wars to world wars. The nation has survived Prohibition, the Red Scare, and Wall Street bankers. But, if yoga were to become the law of the land the American way-of-life as we know it might be irrevocably changed. From health care to the NFL the economic, cultural, and social landscape could undergo a profound transformation.

Whether such a paradigm shift would be for good or ill is an issue open for argument. With yoga expanding at its current rate it is an argument ripe for social scientists, futurists, and policy makers. What is a moot point is that if yoga did expand from sea to shining sea, in the space of the next twenty years America might see a return to its original founding vision as an entirely new ‘City Upon a Hill’, except this time it might be the ‘Ashram on a Hill’.

A version of this story appeared in Yoga Chicago Magazine.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Constructed Reality

Raise High the Roof Beam

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By Ed Staskus

   When I moved into the Plaza Apartments on Prospect Ave. at the intersection of E. 32nd St., which wasn’t even a street since the other end of it dead-ended into a parking lot, it was by accident, including a car accident and bumping into Arunas Petkus a few days later.  The car accident happened when a flash of sunshine distracted me. Bumping into Arunas was simply by chance.

   I was living at Dixon Hall up the street near E. 40th St. A decade after I moved out it was designated a legacy building and historic location but when I lived there it was a rat’s nest, full of students, day laborers, and deadbeats. It was a solid four-story stone and brick building that had gone to seed. 

   Hookers and boozehounds roamed Prospect Ave. in the evening after the blue collars and shop owners went home. The junkies stayed in the shadows, hapless and harmless, mumbling and nodding off. I avoided roughnecks on the prowl, who were hoping to stumble on a sucker. Nobody from the suburbs ever came day-tripping, much less set foot on Upper Prospect at night.

   My roommate Gary was ten years older than me and was drinking himself to death, day by day, from the bottom of his heart. I first met him the day before moving in with him, when I answered a worse for wear note on a bulletin board at Cleveland State University, a ten-minute walk away. He was stocky, bearded, and sullen, but I needed a cheap room, and his second bedroom was available.

   It wasn’t any great shakes of an apartment, which was a living room, walk-in kitchen, and two small bedrooms. There were more cockroaches than crumbs in the kitchen. The sofa and upholstered chairs were a flop. Gary kept cases of beer stacked up by the back door and his whiskey under lock and key.

   I didn’t know much about spirits except that all the grown-ups I knew, who were most of them Lithuanian, drank lots of it, some more than others. I didn’t know why Gary was going breakneck down the river, but he was and wasn’t in in any kind of shape anymore to do much more than sit around and drink.

   The day he told me he was going out to pick up his car was a surprise, since he was living on some kind of inheritance and almost never went out. I didn’t even know he knew how to drive. I was even more surprised when he asked me if I wanted to go along.

   “Where is it?” I asked.

   “Down by 36th and Payne,” he said.

   We could walk there since it was a sunny day. E. 36th and Payne Ave. was only about twenty minutes away by foot.

   “All right,” I said, which was my first mistake.

   His car was a 1963 VW Beetle with a new engine block and repainted a glossy lime. He paid cash in hundred dollar bills and we drove off, down E. 55th St. to the lake, up E. 72nd St. to St. Clair Ave., and back to Dixon Hall. When he pulled up to the curb, he asked me if I knew how to drive a standard shift.

   “Sure,” I said.

   “Do you want to try it?”

   “Sure,” I said, which was my second mistake.

   I didn’t get far, about a quarter mile. As we were approaching the intersection of E. 30th St. and Prospect Ave. a flash of sunshine glancing off the glossy yellow-green hood of the car distracted me. I turned my head to the left. That was my third and last mistake.

   I didn’t see the four-door sedan going through the red light to my right and never touched the brake. He smashed into the front fender of the VW, sending us spinning, and a car behind us smashed into our rear engine compartment. The opposed 4 engine made a last gasp and went dead.

   When we came to a stop the VW Beetle was finished and I was finished as Gary’s roommate. I was just barely able to talk him into giving me a week to scare up another roof over my head. The fall quarter at Cleveland State University was rolling along and winter wasn’t far away.

   I was playing beggar-my-neighbor with friends in the Stillwell Hall ground floor cafeteria when Arunas Petkus joined us, snagging a card game in his free time. He was Lithuanian like me. We had gone to St. Joe’s together, a Catholic high school on the east side, and he was an art major at Cleveland State University. He had a deft hand drawing and painting. He piped up when he heard about my predicament.

   “Try the Plaza,” he said. “There’s a one bedroom on the second floor that’s come open. Somebody I know moved out in the middle of the night.”

   The Plaza was just down the street from Dixon Hall. I had never paid much attention to it, but when I gave it a closer look, I liked what I saw. It was built in 1901 in an eclectic style, on a stone foundation, with some blocks of the same stone in the exterior, and facing of yellow brick in front and around the courtyard. Some of the brick was sprouting ivy. The top of the five stories was crenellated. It had a cool vibe when I walked around it, eyeballing the stamping ground.

   Dave Bloomquist and Allen Ravenstine, who was the synthesizer player for the Cleveland-based art-rock band Pere Ubu, owned and operated the building.

   “I grew up at the Plaza. It’s where I became an adult,” Allen said. “I was a kid from the suburbs. When we bought this building in 1969, we did everything from paint to carpentry. When it was first built, it had 24 apartments. When we bought it in a land contract, there were 48 apartments. We tried to restore it unit by unit.”

   I knocked on Dave Bloomquist’s door. His apartment was at the crown, in the front, facing north, looking out across Chinatown, Burke Lakefront Airport, and out to Lake Erie. When he answered the door, I don’t know what I expected, but what I got was a tall young man, maybe six and a half feet of him, a thick mop of black hair, and an old-school beard.

   “I’m here about the apartment on the second floor,” I said.

   He led me through the kitchen, down a hallway, and into an office full of books, records, a big desk, and sat me down in a beat-up leather armchair.

   I didn’t blanch when he told me what the rent was because it wasn’t much, but I didn’t have much. I could make the first month, maybe the second. I hemmed and hawed until he finally asked me if I was short.

   “More or less,” I said.

   “Would you be willing to work some of it off?”

   “Yes, you bet.”

   “Good, we can work that out. Do you play chess, by any chance? You look like you might.”

   “I know how to play,” I said, but didn’t say anything about my reading chess how-to books.

   “Great, do you want to play a game?”

   “Sure.”

   He had a nice board and played a nice game, but I finished him off in less than twenty moves.

   “Beginner’s luck,” I said.

   “After you’ve moved in stop by, we’ll talk more about some work for you, and play again,” he said.

   I went down the front steps, out the door, and sat down on what passed for a stoop. A young woman stuck her head out of a basement window behind me. I looked at her. She was a looker.

   “I haven’t seen you around here before,” she said. “Are you moving in?”

   “Yes, in the next couple of days.”

   “Do you have a car?”

   “No.”

   “That’s good,” she said. “I’ve lost two cars living here.”

   “That’s too bad.”

   “I love living here, but it drives me crazy at night,” she said. Her name was Nancy and she was studying art. She wanted to be a teacher. “The junkies sit right here on this ledge and party all night long. They never see anything happening, like my cars being stolen.” The dopeheads didn’t have the smarts to steal cars. The making off happened when bad guys came down Cedar Rd. looking for easy pickings.

   I moved in over the course of one day, since I didn’t have much other than my clothes, bedsheets, kitchen dishes, utensils, pots and pans, schoolbooks, and a dining room table and chairs my parents bought for me. I lived on pancakes, pasta, and peanut butter. The apartment wasn’t furnished, but whoever had left in a hurry left a queen bed, a dresser, and a livable sofa. 

   A man by the name of Bob Flood, who lived on the same second floor like me, but in the front, not the back like me, helped me carry the table and chairs up. He was dressed in denim, wore a denim cap, making him look like a railroad engineer, had a little shaggy beard and bright eyes, and was on the rangy side. He walked in a purposeful way, like an older man, even though he wasn’t an old man. Everybody called him Mr. Flood.

   I found out later he was divorced and had two children who visited him, but I never found out if he worked for a railroad or what he did, at least not for a fact. He was either at home for days on end or he wasn’t. I had worked at Penn Central’s Collinwood Yards the winter before as a fill-in, sometimes unloading railcar wheels, sometimes walking the yard with a pencil and waybill clipboard. I didn’t remember ever seeing him there.

   “What kind of people live here?” I asked him.

   “All kinds,” he said. “There are a lot of musicians, artists, writers, some students and even a couple of professors.”

   “It’s an energy house,” said Scott Krause, who was the drummer for Pere Ubu.

   “Not everybody’s in the arts,” Mr. Flood said. “There are beauticians, bartenders, and bookstore clerks, too.” 

   “If you want to stick your head out the window and sing an aria, someone might listen, and someone might even applaud,” said Rich Clark from his open window. Nobody had window air conditioners.

   I found out almost everybody was more younger than older, except for an Italian couple and their parrot. The parrot never sang or spoke outside the family, no matter how much the Italians coaxed and cajoled him. The bird was as stubborn as a mule.

   Once winter was done and spring was busting out, I was reading a book for fun in the courtyard when Arunas Petkus stepped up to the bench I was sprawled out on. He wanted to know if I wanted to go to California with him once classes at Cleveland State University were done for the summer.

   “All that tie dye is finished there,” I said. “Even the hippies say so.”

   “I thought we could visit Chocolate George’s grave.”

   “Who’s Chocolate George?”

   George Hendricks was a Hells Angel in the San Francisco chapter who was hit by a car while swerving around a stray cat one August afternoon in 1967 as the Summer of Love was winding down. He was thrown from his motorcycle and died later that night from his injuries. He was known as Chocolate George because he was rarely seen without a quart of his favorite beverage, which was chocolate milk.

   “He drank chocolate milk because he had an ulcer,” explained Mary Handa, a friend of his. “He spiked it with whiskey from time to time.” He scored nips of the booze all day long.

   George Hendricks was a strapping 34-year-old when he died. He was a favorite among the hippies in Haight-Ashbury because he was funny and friendly. Sometimes he sported a Russian fur hat, making him look like a Cossack. His mustache and goatee were almost as long as his long hair, he wore a pot-shaped helmet when riding his Harley, and his denim vest was sprinkled with an assortment of round tinny pin badges. One of the badges said, “Go Easy on Kesey.”

   The writer Ken Kesey had been the de facto head of the Merry Pranksters. Much of the hippie aesthetic traced back to them and their Magic Bus.

   “I bought a used car,” Arunas said.

   It was parked in the back next to the nerve-wracking back stairs. The stairs were sketchy. Going up and down them always felt like it might be the last time as they twitched and shook and seemed on the verge of yanking themselves off the brick façade. I avoided them whenever I could.

   The car was a two-door 1958 VW Karmann Ghia. “You know how the Beetle has got a machine-welded body with bolt-on fenders,” Arunas said.

   I didn’t know, but I nodded agreement keeping my distance from the car. It looked like a soul mate to the stairs. It was pock-marked with rust and seemed like it might fall apart any second.

   “Well, the Karmann Ghia’s body panels are butt-welded, hand-shaped, and smoothed with English pewter.”

   I didn’t know what any of that meant, either, but nodded again.

   “Does it drive?”

   “It got me here.”

   “From where?”

   He bought the VW at a used car lot on E. 78th and Carnegie Ave.. It was two or three miles away, on the Misery Mile of used car lots.

   “Where is Chocolate George buried, exactly?” I asked.

   “He’s not buried, not exactly,” Arunas said.

   Five days after his death more than two hundred bikers followed a hearse up and down San Francisco’s narrow streets, pausing and revving their engines at the Straight Theater, near where the accident happened. Two quarts of chocolate milk were perched next to the cold body in the back of the hearse. The funeral ceremony was performed at the Cypress Lawn Cemetery, Chocolate George was cremated, and his ashes scattered over Twin Peaks, which are in the center of the city.

   The funeral procession became a motorcycle cavalcade, roaring to Golden Gate Park where, joined by hundreds of hippies from Haight-Ashbury, a daylong wake erupted. Big Brother & the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead were the live music send-offs. There was dancing and psychedelic merrymaking.   

   “Sometimes the lights all shining on me, other times I can barely see, lately it occurs to me, what a long, strange trip it’s been,” Jerry Garcia sang in his mid-western twang. There was free beer courtesy of the Hells Angels and free food supplied by the Diggers.

   The Haight Street Diggers were said to be a “hippie philanthropic organization.” They used the streets of San Francisco for theater, gatherings, and walkabouts. The organization fed the flock that made the scene in the Panhandle with surplus vegetables from the Farmer’s Market and meat they routinely stole from local stores.

   Two months after Chocolate George’s funeral the Diggers announced “The Death of the Hippie” by tearing down the store sign of the Psychedelic Shop and secretly burying it in the middle of the night.

   “So, do you want to go?” Arunas asked, his hand on the hood of the Karmann Ghia.

   “Sure,” I said, short on memory and long on summertime.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Baltic Place

Close to the Bone

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By Ed Staskus

   Afterwards, my mother could never remember exactly where she met her first grown-up boyfriend, Vladas the soldier. “It was in Nuremberg, but I don’t know if I met him at one of the dances at the hospital or at a coffeehouse or out walking,” she said.

   It might have been at the city zoo, where she went most days weather permitting, leading twenty thirty children from the ward where she worked, children who were recovering from the war, for a walk in the fresh air and sunshine. Her youngest niece, Gema, was one of the kids.They threw groundnuts to the elephants, even though elephants don’t like nuts and hardly ever eat them.

   Angele and her friend Maryte, her friend from the same DP camp in Bavaria, who was the friend who told her about starting over in Nuremberg, when they had the chance the two of them jumped on the tram for the two-mile ride to town, where they slipped into a restaurant or coffeehouse, ordered coffee and got an earful of music for an hour-or-so.

   “Someone was always playing a piano. We would sit and listen and order another coffee if we had to so we could stay and listen some more.”

   Angele Jurgelaityte was living at the Army Hospital in Nuremberg, studying to be a nurse assistant. She fled Lithuania in late 1944, when she was 16 years old, on her aunt’s horse-drawn wagon, in a line of carts and wagons miles long. Three other Lithuanian women and she shared a small room, all of them training and working, on the grounds of the hospital.

   Vladas was a Lithuanian Army officer who served as a guard at the war crime trials a couple of years earlier and was still stationed in the city. He wanted back to the homeland, but it wasn’t looking likely.

   Many Baltic military officers, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, were assigned security functions in the Allied zones after the war. They guarded bridges and buildings. Some of them kept an eye on Germany’s war criminals during the series of thirteen Nuremberg trials. After the suicides and executions of those Nazis judged to have committed genocide and crimes against humanity, some of the officers and their units stayed in the city, protecting weapon arsenals, food supplies, and the airport.

   “He was my first boyfriend. He was my friend, but he was a father to me, too,” Angele said. It was summer, three years after the end of the war. She was 20 and he was 33. He had access to food most Germans and no refugees had access to. He brought her some of it. He brought her oranges and apples. One day he brought bananas.

   “I had never had one before.”

   Vladas was married with a home and a six-year-old daughter in Lithuania. He told Angele his wife was dead. He explained how he had been deployed when the Russians swarmed the Baltics, got caught up in the retreat, and couldn’t rescue retrieve his wife and child. They were left behind to fend for themselves. When his wife died soon afterwards, his daughter was taken in by his mother.

   “When he told me his wife was dead, I didn’t believe him. I told him that, about not believing him, but he didn’t say anything.” Instead of trying to explain, he wrote a letter to his mother. She sent him a letter in return. He took it to Angele.

   “He brought it to me unopened. We sat down together on a sofa and he gave it to me. I opened it.” The only thing inside the envelope was a black and white snapshot of the headstone on the grave of his wife.

   “I was dumbstruck, but no matter, I wasn’t ready to get married. At the same time, I was friends with Vytas.” She was getting only so close to Vladas. She hadn’t told and he didn’t know about Vytas, her other boyfriend in the making, a young man her own age, who was in the fast lane.

   “I told Vladas, sorry, we have to end it. Besides, he had only talked to me about marriage once, while Vytas told me a hundred times we were going to get married.”

   Vytas Staskevicius was from Siauliai. It is both a district and a city in northern Lithuania. The road getting there is the gateway to the Hill of Crosses, a pilgrimage site created in the 19th century as a symbol of resistance to Russian rule. There are more than 100,000 crosses on and around the hill.

   His father, who had been governor of the province, was arrested in 1940 and died of starvation in a forest labor camp in Siberia. His mother, a native of Russia, was picked up and deported to Siberia in 1944, where she still was and would remain for another eight years.

   He severely hurt his hand in an accident on the family farm during the war, and after fleeing Lithuania in early fall 1944, black marketed whatever he could get his hands on, worked on and off for the American Army, and was now working for a relief agency. He had gone to the Army Hospital in Nuremberg several times, starting in 1947, where Dr. Rudaitis, a Lithuanian specialist, was performing reconstructive surgery on his injury.

   Angele met Vytas the second day he first came to the hospital. He was unconscious on an operating table. They met again and started talking and seeing each other after he was back on his feet. “We went for walks and to the movies,” she said. They didn’t go to any theaters, as much as Angele enjoyed musical theater. The show would have got in the way. They didn’t hold hands, being careful not to get off on the wrong foot, since his hand was healing.

   “I liked him. He was a steady man, not a fancy man.” When he came back to the hospital in spring 1948, they got reacquainted, getting more intimate, growing closer. Intimacy is healing when the lifeline to your home has been broken and your bones broken, too. They heal better when they have a reason.

   When he went back to Hanau, she put her nose to the grindstone. It was all she could do. She had gotten her certification and was saving everything she could for passage to North America, where she was determined to go to build a new life.

   “I couldn’t go home, I couldn’t stay in Germany, and there wasn’t any future for us in Europe,” she said. “All of us were trying to go somewhere.”

   She was being paid in the new Deutsche Marks for working at the hospital, unlike many others who were paid partly with money and partly with cigarettes, or only with cigarettes, which were a kind of currency in post-war Germany. Vytas was paid room and board and 32 packs of Turkish cigarettes a month working for an international relief outfit in Hanau.

   “Everybody smoked,” said Angele.

   She was smoking in a hallway one day when Vytas’s bone doctor approached her. “I put my hand behind my back,” she said. There was no hiding the smoke, however.

   “Dr. Rudaitis gave me a long lecture about not smoking. Finally, he left.”

   By the time he did the cigarette had smoldered down to a butt and she had to stub it out. It was like burning money. Deutsche Marks cost too much to burn, she thought, and thought about quitting, but didn’t, not just then.

   Apart from study and work and more work, writing letters, breakfast dinner sleep, the four Lithuanian roommates, Ele, Koste, Monica, and Angele, talked, played cards, and talked some more in their single room.

   “We played rummy and talked all the time, about our friends, politics, the future, and the movies.” They all enjoyed the circus, too, but only Angele went to the city’s theaters.

   “I loved going to the musical shows. Maryte and I would go together.” One day on their way they stopped and got a strip of pictures taken of themselves, their heads close together, in a coin-operated photo booth kiosk.

   “We were in our seats, during the show looking at our pictures, and laughing when someone behind us complained. An usher came and told us we had to move to the back row and be quiet or we would have to leave.”

   They sat in the back row quiet as mice the rest of the show.

   Their room at the Army Hospital was fitted with four twin beds, a sofa, and a table. The table barely sat the four of them. They played cards among themselves and sometimes with friends, although men rarely played with them, except Vytas.

   “He would come to our room when he was having another operation on his hand and always play cards with us, squeezing himself in. He was the only man who did.”  By then she was almost certain he was the one she was going to marry.

   “None of my friends wanted me to be friends with him. Koste and Monica thought he was the wrong man. Ele wanted me to be friends with her brother, but he and I both knew we didn’t like the other one, at all.”

   She was hoping Vytas would be able to get a job at the Army Hospital. One of the maintenance men, a fellow Lithuanian refugee, told them he was moving on and had recommended Vytas. When the time came, though, he changed his mind at the last minute, deciding to stay.

   “After that we weren’t friends,” Angele said. She was vexed her man was not going to be able to be nearby all the time. The more she thought about it the more ticked off she became.

   One evening she saw the maintenance man walking down the long corridor towards their room. She dashed inside, poured a thick glass tumbler full of water, opened the door slightly, and positioned the glass on top of the door. She left it ajar. When she heard him passing, she called his name out. He pushed the door open, the glass tumbled over, and his head shoulders shirt were drenched with water.

   “He got so mad!” said Angele.

   “Who did this?” he yelled.

   “The girls were all in the room. They saw what I had done but all of them said they didn’t know who did it.”

   “This is so childish!”

   It probably was a childish prank. At least it wasn’t deadly serious. He changed his shirt and toweled off his drenched head. Many heavy bombs had fallen on the heads of everyone in and around Nuremberg for more than a year. Better a tumbler of water than being rumbled by explosions. Better to be a rumble fish with a chance to swim away.

   “You did it,” he said, pointing at Angele.

   “I did not do it,” she lied.

   During the war Nuremberg was a production center for armaments. It was densely populated, as well, well-suited for the purposes of the deadly area bombing strategy the British had devised. They used a mix of explosive and incendiary bombs, seeking to create firestorms on the ground.

   From February 1944 until the end of the war nearly twenty major raids involving more than eight thousand USA Army Air Force and RAF Pathfinder planes bombed the city. B-17’s, B-24’s, and Lancaster’s attacked plants making motorcycles, engines for submarines, and parts for tanks. They destroyed more than a hundred other factories. They destroyed the marshaling yard, the main railway lines, and the Reichsbahn. They destroyed industrial and infrastructure targets everywhere, since by that time the Allies exercised air supremacy.

   It was mess at the end of the war, blown up, torn apart, families lost and separated. Koste, Monica, and Angele were alone in Germany. Only Ele had family with her, two brothers. By 1947 all were looking for a way out.

   At the end of summer 1948 Angele was ready to go. She had not been able to get permission to go to the United States. She was going to Canada, instead. She didn’t have a sponsor, but since she worked in the children’s ward at the Army Hospital, she had the skills to be a nanny once she was there.

   All she had to do was get there. It was now or never. It was time to stop marking the time.

   After VE Day there were about twelve million DP’s in Europe. Some half of them were repatriated to their homelands within a few months. Almost four hundred refugee camps were set up in the Allied zones in Germany for the rest.

   Two years after the end of the war American policy was revised so that every refugee who wanted to emigrate had to have a sponsor. When not enough were found, Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act, providing for more than 200,000 DP’s to enter the United States. Nearly half of those designated were Ukrainian, who under no circumstances wanted to go home, home meaning almost certain death.

   Many Russian refugees flatly refused to board transports bound for Mother Russia. Some Baltics killed themselves rather than be repatriated. General Dwight Eisenhower banned the use of forced repatriation in the American zone.

   By the 1950s about a million DP’s had been absorbed by Western European countries. Approximately half a million were accepted by the United States and a further half million by other nations, more than forty of them. Some refugees remained in camps through the decade. It was only near the end of 1960 that the last refugee camp was finally closed.

   As she was packing to go to Hamburg, Angele got a note from Vladas. “Merry Christmas on the first day of the holidays. My squad visited my quarters to wish me a happy holiday, but I wasn’t happy with them or myself.”

   On November 16, 1948, she caught a morning train for the Port of Hamburg, boarded a repurposed troop carrier, sailed up the Elbe River, the next day crossed the North Sea, and the rest of the week rode out the rough Atlantic Ocean. It was the second half of the month of Lapkritis.

   Lapas means leaf in Lithuanian and kristi means fall.

   “It took nine days to cross the ocean and I was sick for nine days,” Angele said. She landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, boarded a train with the Canada-bound refugees who had been on the S.S. Marine Flasher, disembarking 27 hours later in Montreal, where she was shuffled around like a second cousin for several weeks before getting her walking papers, and caught a second train to Sudbury, Ontario, riding the rails for another 24 hours.

   Sudbury is the largest city in northern Ontario and by land area the largest in the province and the fifth largest in the country. Its economy was dominated by the mining industry for most of the 20th century. The big mining companies were the major employers in the city and the world’s leading producers of nickel. Outside the city proper the landscape looked like the landscape of the moon.

   The use of open coke beds into the mid-20th century and logging for material to burn resulted in the nearly complete loss of trees far and wide. By the 1940s all the pink-gray granite for fifty miles had long been turned black by air pollution from the roasting yards.

   She was going to be the nanny for the Lapalme’s, one of the leading families in the city, reportedly “the largest family in Sudbury.” Five of the children were under ten. They were going to be her responsibility. She celebrated Christmas alone that winter, at a desk writing a letter to Vytas.

   “Two of the grown-up Lapalme’s, in their early 20s, are in the next room with their friends, young French couples, dancing, as I write to you. They invited me to join them since one of them had been in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany and speaks German, but I said thank you, no.”

   She stayed by herself in her room. The song “Chattanooga Choo Choo” on the record player bubbled through the gap under the door. The Lapalme’s were dancing to the Glenn Miller Orchestra. The big-band man’s airplane had disappeared in bad weather over the English Channel four years earlier when he was traveling to France to entertain Allied troops. Only his music was still alive.

   “You don’t understand how lonely it is to be here. I am waiting,” Angele wrote.

   “She’s gonna cry, until I tell her that I’ll never roam, so Chattanooga choo choo, won’t you choo-choo me home?” She skipped over the rest of the song as the needle grooving the record started to skip, marking the time now and then and shaping the time to come in her own mind’s eye.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Constructed Reality

Flower Power

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By Ed Staskus

   My father was a firm believer in the harder you work the better your station. He meant better car, better house, more money in the bank, and basically better everything. He was a refugee from Lithuania, getting out of Europe in 1949 with a duffel bag and twenty-five dollars in his pocket. By the time he got to Sudbury, Ontario he was down to five dollars, but found employment at a cement factory the next day. Even though I wasn’t sure the long march to better was better, I was barely 15 years old the summer of 1966 and not about to argue with him.

   When I came home from my last two-week Lithuanian boys and girls summer camp on Wasaga Beach I was immediately put to work. My father got a job for me on the chain gang of a landscaper who was redoing the grounds at Mt. Sinai Hospital. We trimmed trees, ripped out dead shrubs, replacing them with new ones, buried bulbs, and planted flowers.

   Mount Sinai Hospital began in 1892 as the Young Ladies’ Hebrew Association “caring for the needy and sick.” It opened as a hospital in 1903 on E. 32nd St., catering to east side Jews, then moved to a bigger building on E. 105th  St. in 1916. In time it became the healthcare provider to Cleveland’s urban poor.

   My number one thankless assignment was helping unload soggy clods of rolled-up sod and laying them down to make new lawns. That meant removing the old grass and some of the worn-out soil beneath it, preparing the ground with a bow rake, breaking up large chunks, laying the sod, neatening the edges, and finally watering it. Handling the hose was the easiest best part of the job. By the end of the first day, I was damp, dirty, tired, and underpaid. 

   I got a ride to work every morning from Val, a Lithuanian American like me home from college. He drove a 1960 Plymouth Valiant with push-button transmission shifters. There was no button for park, but there was a lever for it. Moving the lever to the end put the transmission into park and popped out whatever button was in gear. It was for laughs watching him smack the buttons from first to second to drive.

   We hopped on I-90 at E. 185th St. and took the Liberty Blvd. exit, driving along the winding road through Rockefeller Park to the work site. The 200-acre park was given to the city by John D. Ruthless in 1897. Four stone bridges carried traffic and trains over the road, there was a lagoon for rowing, fishing, and ice skating at the end of it, and a couple dozen Cultural Gardens down the three-mile length of it.

   The gardens are a series of landscaped green spots honoring ethnic communities in Cleveland, set up from the south shore of Lake Erie to University Circle. The first one was the Shakespeare Garden in 1916, which later became the British Garden. The Cultural Garden League carved out the next one, the Hebrew Garden, in 1926. After that they were off to the races. In the next ten years 14 more gardens were created, including the Italian, Hungarian, and Lithuanian. The idea was to rave on the city’s immigrant groups, which at the time made up about a third of the population.

   In 1936 the city unified the gardens with bordered paths. Busts and statues were installed in many of them. The first One World Day took place in 1946. A parade of nationality floats and bands blaring old hometown tunes started downtown at Public Square, crept six miles along Euclid Ave. to the Cultural Gardens, where there were speeches and a ceremony. Afterwards there was food, souvenir stands, strolling around the gardens, hobnobbing, and dancing to more music. By the middle of the day it sounded like the Tower of Babel.

   We were listening to “Hanky Panky” by Tommy James and the Shondells on the car radio one Wednesday morning, curving down onto Liberty Blvd. on our way to work, when we were brought up short by a Jeep with a machine gun mounted on the back. It was blocking the road. There were more Jeeps scattered in the distance. “One of the Jeeps had a plastic lei hanging down from the .50 caliber gun,” said Wayne Baker, who lived in the St. Clair – Superior neighborhood. A line of cars was backing up and going the way they had come. Val pulled over to the side until a National Guardsman walked up to our car. 

   “Turn around fellas,” he said. “This road is going to be closed today, maybe the rest of the week.”

   “Why, what’s going on?” Val asked.

   “The niggers are raising hell, busting into stores, burning them down.”

   “What about the parade?” I asked. One World Day was scheduled for the weekend. My parents, brother, sister, and I always went. All my friends went. It was a big thing.

   “I don’t know about no parade, but there ain’t going to be one until things cool down.”

   The street fighting had started Monday when a black man walked into the white-owned Seventy-Niners Café at Hough Ave. and E. 79th St. He asked for a glass of cold water to cool down. It had been a hot day in a long hot summer. The bartender said no, get the hell out of here. Somebody else posted a hand-written sign. It said “No water for niggers.” 

   One thing led to another and before long the Cleveland Police Department had a riot on its hands. The more policemen who showed up the bigger the mob got. By the next day there weren’t enough policemen in the city to handle the uproar. Mayor Ralph Locher asked Ohio Governor James Rhodes to send in the National Guard. They showed up through the night and deployed in the morning.

   Helen Provenzano’s father got a call early that morning that all the windows in his restaurant on E. 97th St. and Euclid Ave. were broken and he should bring plywood pronto. The eatery was the family’s bread and butter. By the end of the day there was a run on sheets of plywood at hardware stores.

    “Why are you home so early,” my mother asked after Val dropped me off. “Did you do something wrong?”

   “No, the colored people did, there’s a riot going on and we couldn’t get to work,” I said.

   In the mid-1960s 60% of northern whites agreed that Negro students should be able to go to the same schools.70% agreed with residential integration. 80% agreed that they should be able to get the same jobs as white folks. 90% agreed that they should enjoy public transportation just like everybody else. 100% of Lithuanian Americans didn’t care what bus Negroes rode to whatever job, but the same 100% was opposed to colored kids in their schools and colored families moving into their neighborhoods. When the moving started was when the white flight started.

   My parents weren’t any different than any other Lithuanian I ever heard say anything about it. They hated Russians, disliked Jews, and looked down on Negroes. Their culture was one of religion, property, and community. They thought Negroes were bad Americans, slow-moving and shiftless, belonged to the wrong religion, and didn’t respect private property.

   Where we lived there were no Negroes, at all. I delivered the Cleveland Press afternoon newspaper door-to-door six days a week and collected money for it once a week. I knew the faces of who lived on our street of one hundred-some houses. There weren’t any black hands on my route handing me their payment of 50 cents and a tip if they wanted the rubber-banded paper to land securely on their front porch the following week.

   Our high school, St Joseph’s, was the same as my paper route. I might see a black face once in a blue moon, but not in any of my classes. They were the janitors. There were lots of big Catholic families in our neighborhood of North Collinwood, and they were a solid block of European stock.

   After Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and the emerging Civil Rights movement, the times were slowly changing, but it was a bumpy change. Integration meant ill will and uproar. There had been a couple of incidents at Collinwood High School, a few miles southwest of us, the year before. “With the passage of each year, the western fringes of the Collinwood area are being occupied by the Negro overflow from Glenville,” according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which was the morning paper.

   The Five Points riot happened four years later. Four hundred white students and their parents milling around Collinwood High School in the morning started throwing rocks, smashing more than 50 windows. The 200 newly enfranchised Negro students attending the school fled to the third-floor cafeteria. When the mob stormed into the building the Negroes blocked the stairs to the third floor with tables and chairs, breaking off the legs to arm themselves. Cleveland police from the 3rd, 4th and 5th Districts poured in, forming a cordon to keep the whites from attacking the blacks who were boarding buses. 

   “Always be careful around them,” my mother said, meaning Negroes. “They might have a knife.”

   My mother and father believed Negroes went nuts at the drop of a hat. I took my parents at their word. It was always touch-and-go messing with their point-of-view. They survived three invasions while growing up in Lithuania, were in Germany during the convulsive last months of the Third Reich, emigrated to North America with just about nothing except willpower, and worked their way up to be devout Republicans in the New World. They were short-tempered about anybody questioning their beliefs.

   Once, goofing around, I said, “And in this corner, still undefeated, my mom and dad and their long-held beliefs.” That was a big mistake, especially since they were within earshot.

   Hough was a powder keg the summer of 1966. Downtown was white, University Circle to the east was white, and in the middle was Hough, which was black. The housing was substandard and overcrowded. The area stores were crappy and overcharged for their wares. The police were surly about who they were serving and protecting. When the race riot got rolling, there was rock throwing, looting, arson, and some gunfire. Four people were killed, all four of them Negroes. Two were caught in crossfires, one was killed by a white passerby while waiting at a bus stop, and one was shot by a Little Italy man who said it was self-defense. More than 30 were injured, close to 300 were arrested, and 240-some fires were set. There was an estimated $2 million in property damage. Many homes burned to the ground, most of them in Hough. 

   A friend of mine’s grandmother, born at the turn of the century in Lithuania, was upset and wanted to go home to “my own place,” which was her home on White Ave. north of Hough Ave. She was staying with the family in the meantime. The big houses all around her small house had all been made into boarding houses. They were overcrowded, but what could anybody do who was chronically short of hard cash?

   Real family income rose rapidly in the 1960s. From 1960 to 1970, median family income, adjusted for inflation, rose to $20,939 from $15,637. It did, at least, if you were white. It didn’t if you were black. It went the other way.

   “It is a stark reality that the black communities are becoming more and more economically depressed,” Bayard Rustin wrote in 1966. “There has been almost no change or change for the worse in the daily lives of most blacks,” Carmichael and Hamilton wrote in 1967. “Although it is true that the income of middle-class Negroes has risen somewhat, the income of the great mass of Negroes is declining,” Martin Duberman wrote in 1968.

   You can only do so much with less. It’s smooth sailing when there’s money in the piggybank. It’s a hard slog when the piggybank is starving. Living on bits and pieces is bitter and maddening.

   “The white man is reaping what he has sown. He is learning you can’t push people around. The trouble is here because the white man won’t treat the black man right,” the owner of a barber shop in Hough said. 

   A grand jury later concluded that the Communist Party, outside agitators, and black nationalists organized the uprising, but the finding was laughed off. No Communists had been seen in Cleveland for years and not even outside agitators nor black nationalists wanted to be caught dead in Hough, fearing for their health and safety.

   An angry crowd started a big fire at Cedar Ave. and E. 106th St. at the start of the weekend, burning down most of a block of stores, but that was the high and low point of the disturbance. Life in the ghetto returned to normal on Sunday and the next day merchants started reopening. The National Guard was released from duty. Val and I went back to work mid-week.

   From where we stood on the grounds of Mt. Sinai Hospital it looked like nothing had happened. But there were two Cleveland Police cars parked at the front, and one near the back, that whole week. There had always been police cars around the hospital, but those three stayed around the clock.

   Nobody talked much about the riot, except to say, “those spades are crazy.” My parents and their friends said, “it’s a damned shame about the parade.” Val and I shouldered on for another two-some weeks. When the project was done, we were sent out to Bratenahl, mowing lawns for the millionaires who lived in the east side village’s lakeside mansions.

   Our last day at Mt. Sinai, which was a Friday and payday, driving home on Liberty Blvd, the Cultural Gardens looking great in the summer sun, Val said, “Have you noticed there isn’t an African American garden?”

   “No,” I said.

   “They were some of the first immigrants, not that they wanted to come here, but still, you would think there would be a garden for them, especially since this is all in their neighborhood.”

   “I guess so,” I said.

    Val was five years older and much wiser than me. He was going to an east coast college, majoring in philosophy. He wore his hair long. Some Lithuanians called him a dirty hippie, even though he worked like a sharecropper.

   The idea of building a garden for Cleveland’s Negro community was brought up in 1961 by Cleveland councilman Leo Jackson. He proposed a “Negro Cultural Garden.”  The mayor supported the proposal, but it was voted down by his finance committee. In 1968 the idea came back, including a statue of Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been assassinated that year. Nothing came of the comeback until 1976, when Congressman Louis Stokes brought it to life again. Ground for the garden was broken and dedicated in 1977, but the project remained unfinished until 2016, almost forty years later, when it was finally finished.

   When we turned off Liberty Blvd., racing up the entrance ramp to I-90, Val punched the spunky Valiant’s push buttons through its gears, and we rode the current of rush hour traffic back to North Collinwood. The weekend was coming up. We were both ready as could be.

   “I’m glad to be going home,” I said.

   “You and me both, man,” Val said. “Shelter from the storm.”

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

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