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Heart to Heart

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By Ed Staskus

   When Francie Chmielewski’s husband Steve doubled over while putting his shoes on, she didn’t bother asking him if he was all right. “I have to sit down,” he said in the backyard. It was a Sunday evening in late May. He was feeling a great deal of pressure on the left side of his chest. “I don’t think it’s my heart, but maybe we should go to Fairview Hospital.” One look at him fumbling and dropping his shoes on the steps of their kitchen told her everything she needed to know. He was not all right. He was having a heart attack.

   “Steve is a very fit man,” Francie said. He wasn’t a man so out of shape he might have a heart attack watching that day’s bad news on TV. “He doesn’t smoke, eats right, and rides his bike to work every day, even in the winter.” His bike ride to work takes an hour one way, from Rocky River to the near east side of Cleveland, and then another hour back home. Two days earlier, on a Friday, he complained to a co-worker about being out of breath during his ride. His co-worker urged him to call his doctor. Steve’s doctor said, “OK, come in on Tuesday.” 

   “What happened on Sunday was the widow maker,” Francie said. ”His main artery shut down.”

   Heart problems were one of the most uncommon causes of death in the United States until 1900. Heart disease had always been uncommon. Fifty years later it was the most common cause of death in the country. It became the go-to way to die. Everybody was smoking their heads off. Doctors routinely appeared in print and on TV promoting their favorite fag. Everybody was eating as much pork and beef as they could get their hands on. The protein was good. The saturated fat was sketchy. The off-the-chart serum cholesterol was terrible.

   It is still the most common cause of death in the United States, despite almost everybody having given up smoking and many former junk foodies eating a more balanced diet. “After I had a heart attack, it was a very simple choice,” said one-time football player and coach Mike Ditka. “What the doctor told me, I did and I did it religiously. I ate nothing but lean turkey breast or chicken breast or a piece of fish that was very lean. I mean, I stayed away from everything.” The misguided popularity of maintaining an unhealthy weight has kept it in the top spot, as has the notion that exercising at least thirty minutes a day five days a week is for somebody else.

   There is never a good time to have a heart attack. The worst time to have one might be during a game of charades. Steve wasn’t playing games. What was happening to him was sudden and massive. He was down and the clock was ticking. Around half of all heart attack deaths occur within one hour, especially if the victim isn’t able to get immediate help and get to a hospital fast. It is called the Golden Hour. The longer a person goes without treatment, the faster the clock ticks.

   “One day my father went hunting,” the French movie director Alain Resnais recalled. “He had a good day. He killed a lot of game. He was with his best friends. He said, ‘Ah, I’m still a good hunter.’ Then he said, ‘I don’t feel well.’ In thirty seconds, it was all over.”

   Steve started to shake and his eyes rolled up and back. One of the issues with heart problems is that the first symptoms can be fatal. “This isn’t looking good,” Francie thought. She got serious as a heart attack and sprang into action. She had been ready for the moment for a long time. She stretched Steve out and began performing CPR on him, at the same time hurriedly calling 911 on her cell phone. She wasn’t the kind of wife who mailed in her request for help, checking the spelling before sealing the envelope. 

   “He had cardiac arrest,” she said. “His heart stopped. When I saw he wasn’t breathing my adrenaline kicked in. I just reacted.” When the Rocky River EMS team got there they checked his heart’s rhythm, gave him oxygen, and administered a blood thinner. They sped him to the Cleveland Clinic in Fairview Park where he spent the next two weeks in the Intensive Care Unit flat on his back hooked up to a ventilator. “I never saw anybody like him,” an ICU nurse told Francie. “Most people in his circumstances die.” 

   “Steve isn’t most people,” Francie told the nurse.

  “The quicker we can get a person having a heart attack into the cardiac catheterization lab the better,” explained Erica Spatz, a cardiologist at Yale Medicine. “Time matters in treating heart attacks.” The heart pumps oxygen-rich blood to the rest of the body through a network of arteries. However, the arteries around the heart can get clogged up, usually by a blood clot. When that happens, blood flow is slowed or blocked. The obstruction is seriously dangerous.

   Nearly a million people in the United States suffer a heart attack every year. It happens about every forty seconds. The cost of care for coronary heart disease is more than $100 billion dollars annually. One of the least expensive and front of the line interventions is CPR. Francie was ready to bust it. “I teach CPR at the Rocky River Recreation Center,” she said. “But I never had to actually do it on a real person. I never thought the first time would be on my own husband.”

   CPR, officially known as Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, is an emergency lifesaving procedure performed when the heart stops beating. It can double or triple the odds of survival after cardiac arrest. It is a critical step in what is called the Chain of Survival. Keeping blood flow active multiplies the chances of a successful resuscitation once medical staff arrives. Professional CPR is about chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth breathing at a ratio of 30 compressions to 2 breaths. The basic recommendation to bystanders who happen upon a heart attack victim is hands-only CPR until help arrives.

   After two weeks in ICU Steve was transferred  to a Step Down Unit at the Cleveland Clinic in Avon, where he stayed for a week-and-a-half. His last five days in the hospital were spent in rehab. One of his daughters was visiting him when a doctor walked in reviewing a chart. “This guy us really sick,” the doctor said to himself. Steve and his daughter dropped what they were doing and stared at him.

   “Oh, sorry, not you, somebody else,” the doctor said, stopping dead in his tracks, quickly flipping to Steve’s chart. “You are actually doing very well.”

   “The doctor told me he was doing well because he had never smoked, was more than fit enough for his age, and had gotten to the hospital soon enough to make a difference,” Francie said. “Only about one out of ten people with his kind of heart attack survive. If he had been a smoker he would have had a zero chance.”

   When Steve got home he wasn’t allowed some of the small pleasures of life, like ice cream and beer. He had to take a handful of prescription drugs every day. He was wired to a heart monitor. He wasn’t allowed to go back to work. He had to take several months off. “His doctor said he could go back in September.” He was allowed to work from home. “They told him not to overdo it.”

   He was hazy about what happened during his near-fatal weekend. “He can’t remember anything about it, from Friday through Sunday,” Francie said. Many of the memories surrounding heart attacks are lost to cardiac arrest survivors. They don’t always come back because the brain didn’t have enough time to store them. It doesn’t always want to remember near death experiences, no matter that the ordeal tends to put things into perspective.

   In some ways life itself is a near death experience. Like the song says, the end is always near. Francie wasn’t patting herself on the back for saving her husband’s life. “I wasn’t sure if he had life insurance or not, so I had to do it,” she explained. Buddha long ago said in plain English that the act of saving a life was a greater good than spending the whole of one’s life making religious offerings to the gods.

   Steve spent the rest of the summer resting, walking up and down stairs, and making further strides with short walks outdoors. He progressed to varied aerobic activities designed to improve circulation, lower blood pressure, and strengthen his heart. Francie watched him like a mother hen. “He is the kind of man who pushes it,” she said. “I told him not to push it.”

   World Heart Day is celebrated every year on September 29th. This year Francie and Steve hope to enjoy the holiday together. “Keep a Healthy Heart So We Won’t Be Apart” has become their new married couple motto.

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

“Bomb City”

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal. Revenge is always personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Jimmy Crack Corn

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By Ed Staskus

   When Layla told Jimmy she had called the police, he hustled to his pick-up truck and started scrounging, searching for his paraphernalia and drugs, especially the crack. He took a garbage bag full of narcotics into the big house and hid it. Afterwards he couldn’t remember where he had put it.

   “The devil knows where I stashed it!” he said. He was so mad about what had happened he could barely talk, which for him was spitting mad, since he talked at ninety miles an hour.

   “The pony run, he jumped, he pitched, he threw the master in the ditch, Jimmy, crack corn and I don’t care.”

   Layla and Jimmy had gotten into a knockdown fight a month earlier and he had left the big house in Florida, going to work in Pennsylvania. He was a heavy machine operator. When she called him after a month he high-tailed it back to her. But it wasn’t what he thought it was going to be.

   “Do you know this could put me back in prison?” Jimmy asked.

   “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, but my lawyer said I had to.” She was already regretting it.

   The police arrived and before he knew it slapped handcuffs on him. 

   “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said. “What are you arresting me for?”

   “You stole that pick-up truck,” one of the policemen said, pointing at the truck.

   “That is bullcrap,” Jimmy said. “I’ve been making payments every month to her for it. I was just in Pennsylvania for a month with it. She was fine with that. I can show you our text messages, where she always says, your truck, your truck, not my truck, yours.”

   “Let me see those text messages,” the policeman said.

   He went to their squad car. He scrolled through the texts. He fiddled with his vehicle’s mobile radio. When he came back he returned the cell phone to Jimmy.

   “I’d say it’s his pick-up truck,”  the policeman said to Layla. “That’s what you’ve been saying in all your text messages.”

   They took the cuffs off. They had to work out a few more details but finally drove away. Jimmy heaved a sigh of relief

   “You called the police on me,” he said to Layla, glaring at her.

   “We can work this out,” she said. She gave him a piece of paper, signed and dated, saying, this is my truck, in my name, but I have given Jimmy full power over it. 

   “There’s no working this out, night and day” he said. “You ruined everything.” 

   “No, Jimmy,” I told him later. “You ruined everything by going out and having a crack weekend. Maybe you shouldn’t have been that stupid.” He didn’t like that. “Don’t blame Layla because she called the cops. Yeah, it’s a crappy thing to do, but it gets to the point where you don’t give people too much choice. It’s always your way or the highway, and if they don’t like it, they can go, so, honestly, I can see where she’s coming from.”

   “Hey, I’m paying her every month for the pick-up,” he said.  “I’m not going to go back on my word. I’m never going back to her, either. She ruined everything.”

   He was talking on his cell phone. I could tell he was driving. I asked him where he was going. “I packed my stuff and I’m going to Colorado,” he said. His boys lived in Colorado. One of them was a Marine. The other one wanted to be a pilot, but his eyes were bad. 

   “Are you high?” I asked him. 

   “I don’t want to answer that,” he said.

   “You’re a special kind of stupid,” I said. “Getting high and drinking and driving, putting yourself and others at risk, you selfish bastard. What’s wrong with you?” 

   “They can’t nail me. I’m not drunk enough.” He had a forever taste for drink and cocaine. I was at a loss for words.

   “Your brother was an addict,” he said.

   “What’s that got to do with anything?”

   “He’s fat, too.” 

   “What? Are you two?” 

   “He replaced drugs with food.” 

   “I have no idea why you’re bringing Brian into this. And he’s not fat, not by far.” 

   “Don’t bother defending your fatso brother,” he said. He hung up and blocked me. He unblocked me a few days later. I sent him a text.

   “This friendship has reached its end. There’s nowhere for it to go.” 

   A month later I got an oversized letter in the mail. It was addressed to Jimmy. He had lived in our house for the best part of a year, getting back on his feet. Some of his mail was still being delivered to our home. He never bothered going to the post office to set up a forwarding address.

   He doesn’t want to hear how he used Shirley and me and never paid us back for everything we paid for while he was living in our house. He doesn’t want to acknowledge we took him in when no one else would, fed him, clothed him, and got him on his feet. What we got in return was nothing, not even a thank you.

   Inside the oversized letter were his new heavy machinery training certificate and new union membership card. Jimmy is notorious for ignoring people. I wasn’t like him. I texted him about the letter.

   “I got your working stuff, where do I mail them to? If I don’t hear from you, they’re in the trash tomorrow.”  He sent me his new address right away.

   We weren’t friends anymore, but we were still friends on Facebook. He posted things about me, playing the victim. “When people throw you out of your life” are the kinds of things he posted. He became a drama queen. 

   I admit when I’m wrong, and I would say to Jimmy, don’t be a dirtbag your whole life. I didn’t know what to do with him. He was constantly pretending he never did anything  wrong, no matter what side of the truth he was on.

   Jimmy and my brother Brian were once best friends, better friends than Jimmy and me, but not anymore.

   “I don’t want to see you again,” he said. “You bent over backwards for your brother but you’re always laying into me. This is the end of the road.”

   But Jimmy is a bad penny and bad pennies always turn up. He complains and explains night and day. “Inside of me are two dogs. One is mean and the other one is good. They fight each other all the time. When asked which one wins, I answer, the one I feed the most.” I expected Jimmy to resurface someday soon.

   When I couldn’t find my favorite suitcase a few days before Shirley and I were going down to Mexico for a week, I called him.

   “Do you have my suitcase?” I asked.

    “I’ve had it for three years,” he said.

   “We take it to Mexico every year. You haven’t had it for three years.”

   “Yes, I have, you’re wrong,” he said.

   “No, you’re wrong,” I said. 

   “No, I’m not.” 

   “Are you ever wrong, Jimmy?” 

   “No.”

   “You sound like you’ve had a few drinks,” I said.

   “Yeah, a few, but I work hard and I need recreation. After this I’m off to see the smoke  wizard. I’m not telling you for fun. I’m telling you because you want me to be honest. I don’t need any judgement from friends.”

   “I’m sorry, but you can’t have it both ways,” I said. “Either you have friends who care about you, or not, so I’m going to say you’re a good for nothing for smoking crack.”

   “I work hard all week. Layla knows what I’m doing,” he said. He was back in Florida in the big house.

   “Then she’s a bigger fool than I thought she was, for letting you smoke crack while you’re supposedly taking care of her.” Layla had more than one health issue. On top of that, she liked watching horror movies on TV and liked being disturbed by them.

   “What are you doing this weekend?” he asked, out of the blue.

   “It’s a blizzard outside, so I’m in the house cooking.”

   I did the cooking at home, although Shirley boiled water, peeled potatoes, and washed the dishes. I like to cook when it’s storming.

   “What are you making?”

   “I’m making spanakopita. It’s a Greek spinach pie, with onions, cheese, and herbs. It’s folded up in a flaky crispy dough.”

   “Oh, you mean spanakapita.”

   “I’m pretty sure it’s pronounced with an O,” I said. 

   “You’re a dimwit,” he said. “You never admit when you’re wrong, do you?” 

   “OK, you’re right. I’m making spanakapita. Happy now?” Why do I talk to Jimmy, I asked myself. Shirley refuses to speak to him.

   “Why do you even talk to that jackass?” she asks me.

   “Why are we even friends?” I asked Jimmy.

   “Are you going to tell me you’re not my friend anymore?”

   “Unfortunately, Jimmy, you and I have been friends since the 3rd grade. There’s just no getting rid of you.”

   “I took Layla to a French restaurant last week.”

   “So, you’re back in her good graces?”

   “Yeah.” 

   “How’s your dad? Is he still alive and kicking?”

   “Yeah.”

   I didn’t ask if his father hung out at Layla’s house anymore. For a while Jimmy’s father, an ex-Cleveland cop who retired south and lived nearby, had tried to get Layla for himself, before Jimmy finally won her over.

   “I heard Layla’s dad has showed up again down there.”

   “Yeah.”

  Layla’s father was a rich man with a twisted mind. like many rich men. Last year, when Jimmy started seeing Layla, he had a fit. In the first place, he hated Jimmy. He called him a loser. He said he was going to shoot him, although he never did. He was a coward at heart. He had an undying love for his daughter, but not the right kind of love.

   “I’m not allowed to be there when he comes over,” Jimmy  said. “I take off.”

   He knows it’s weird, but he makes himself scarce when Layla’s father comes over. She has a big spread, what with her polo ponies, so there’s a lot of landscape to lose yourself in. He didn’t lose himself on horseback. He couldn’t ride to save his life.

   “I don’t understand your life,” I said.

    “I’m being honest,” he said.

   “That doesn’t mean I have to like it. It doesn’t mean I don’t worry about you. You’re romancing a woman 20-some years older than you, who has a father who’s like a hundred, and who, we won’t even talk about that, and you are smoking crack every chance you get.”

   “Everybody has a few drinks. Why can’t I have some crack?”

   “They don’t serve crack at bars in this country, not even Florida, that’s why,” I said.

   “I can control it,” he said.

   “Right, says every crackhead and none ever did,” I said.

   “When I was young I used to wait on master and give him his plate, and pass him the bottle when he got dry, and brush away the blue tail fly, Jimmy, crack corn and I don’t care.”

   “I do my work, then I chill, hang out, be myself,” Jimmy said. He works construction all week, and had started working for Layla, too, doing small jobs, in her house and around her property.

   “Why shouldn’t I do the work, instead of the wetbacks?” he said. “Why shouldn’t I earn the money?”

   What Jimmy likes is Layla has got money and a big house. What she likes is the fun, games, and sex. They are both getting what they think they want. They don’t care about rain as long as they get their rainbows.

   “Basically, you’re doing whatever the hell you want, and she’s doing whatever the hell she wants,” I said. “You’re both femme fatales.”

   That didn’t go over well. Jimmy says he’s being honest whenever he says whatever he says, but he doesn’t want any trueness in return. He thinks you’re getting in his face. Every time we talk, he tells me why he’s the greatest and why Shirley and I are idiots. 

   “Why won’t your wife talk to me?” he asked. 

   “Because you ran out on us after we took care of you when you were down and out,” I said. 

   “That’s not true,” he said.

   “How do you see it in your world?”

   The crack he’s smoked for years hasn’t changed Jimmy all that much. He’s still as selfish and self-righteous as he always was. Shirley says that he will never grow up because he thinks he’s not wrong and will never be wrong, 

   When I told him Shirley’s new business had turned the corner and was doing well, he didn’t want to hear it. When I first told him about it, what she was planning, he told me she would fail, for sure. Nothing is what Jimmy said when I told him her business was growing. For once, he had nothing dismissive to say.

   When Jimmy broke up with Layla the second time it was because, when she got fussy about his drug use, he told her that her addiction to pain medicines and her drinking weren’t any different than his smoking crack and drinking. He told her he was going to smoke crack every day, and that was that. When Jimmy gets it into his head that something is going to be, there’s no changing his mind. Layla thought he was crazy. They got into a knockdown fight.

   “I’m never coming back,” he said at the end of the fight. He walked out of the big house and gave his pick-up truck back to her, but before he did he went mud bog racing with it. When he was done, the first place trophy in his lap, the pick-up truck wasn’t good for anything anymore. He left with his suitcase, his phone, and his wallet. He walked to the bus station.

   “I dropped a truth bomb on her,” he said.

   “I’m going to drop a truth bomb on you,” I said. “You’re homeless, you’re living out of your son’s van, and you don’t have a job.”

   “I’m trying to find work,” he said.

    JJ and Alex, his sons, had a house in Colorado. They invited him to visit them, with the intention of doing an intervention on their father. He got stoned and stayed stoned the whole way, hitching rides with truckers, lost his phone, lost his wallet, and lost his way, but somehow made it there. When he found out what they were up to, he got his hands on Alex’s new van one night and beat feet. 

   “How dare they pull that bullcrap on me!” he fumed.

   Trying to get Jimmy to do something he doesn’t want to do is like trying to dam up Niagara Falls with toothpicks. He drove to Oklahoma where he drove the van into a ditch. He stole two old tires and got back on the road. He made it to Georgia. He called me. He had gotten another phone, somehow.

   “I’m coming to Cleveland.”

   “Why?”

   He showed up a week later. He didn’t have any money. He had stolen his way from Atlanta to Cleveland. He would go to a Walmart, steal bread and cold cuts, go to gas stations, and steal gasoline and snacks. When he had to, he found a backyard bird feeder and ate all the seeds.

   “I have a Home Depot gift card,” he said. “Can you buy it off me?”

   “I’ll think about it.” 

   “You know it’s stolen, don’t you?” Shirley asked me.

   “Yes.”

   Jimmy steals merchandise from big box stores, returns it later for a refund, claiming he has lost the receipt, and gets gift cards in return. He can be slick when he’s beggared.

   We met him for breakfast when he got to Cleveland.

   “I don’t have any gas,” he said, wolfing down ham and eggs and a plate of pancakes.

   “I’ll fill your tank up,” I said.

   He was hoping we would ask him to stay at our house. I could tell. I brought it up to Shirley later at home. But, buying him breakfast and filling up his gas tank was as far as it was going to go.

   “He’s not sitting on our sofa, much less staying at our house,” she said.

   Jimmy called me again about buying the Home Depot card.

   “How much is it?” I asked.

   “It’s $186.00, but you can have it for a hundred.”

   I knew it was throwing money away. We would never use it. It would just be something to help Jimmy out.

   “I have to get out of Cleveland,” he said.

   “Who did you piss off?”

   “Nobody,” he said. 

   “Did you steal some drugs?”

   “I just need to go,” he said.

   “You are such an asshole.”

   “All right, but are you going to buy this gift card, or not?” 

   “OK, I’ll come and get it. I just need to stop at an ATM.”

   “No, I’ll come and get you,” he said.

   Like a fool, when he came over, I got into his van to go to the ATM. He went flying down Detroit Rd. in Lakewood and sideswiped a parked car. He didn’t stop. He just kept going.

   “Stop the car,” I yelled. He stopped some blocks later when he ran into a fire hydrant. It began to spay water.

   The side of his son’s new van, on the passenger side, where I was sitting, was potholed from bumper to bumper. The front bumper had fallen off when he hit the hydrant. Trash and empty cans of Mountain Dew were scattered everywhere inside the van.

   “Do you know you just smashed your kid’s new van? And you drove away. You could have killed me.”

   “I know, but I promise I’ll be good.”

   “Did you steal all that food?” I asked. There were loaves of white bread, jars of Jiffy peanut butter, and half-eaten candy bars a gogo.

   “A guy’s got to eat,” he said.

   The next day JJ called.

   “Alex is in Cleveland,” he said. “He’s gone there to get the van back from our dad.”

   “JJ, why didn’t you tell me he was coming? Jimmy was here yesterday, but now he’s gone.”

   “We called him yesterday and said Alex was coming.”  

   “That was a mistake,” I said. “He’s gone to Canton.”

   “Why Canton?”

   “Because Alex isn’t in Canton, that’s why. He’s hiding from you.”

   They finally located him and Alex went to see him. They met in Canton behind a bowling alley. But Jimmy parked the van a couple of blocks away, so Alex wouldn’t see it and take it away from him. They talked, but Alex never got the van back. He went back to Colorado and Jimmy went back to living in parking lots.

   “When he’d ride in the afternoon, I’d follow after with a hickory broom, the pony being rather shy when bitten by blue tail fly, Jimmy, crack corn and I don’t care.”

   Jimmy thought I had led his sons to him. He thought I was conspiring with them to take the van away from him. He called me on the phone and called me every name in the book.

   “Even though you do what you do to your kids?”

   “That’s right,” he said.

   “You treat them worse than junk yards treat their dogs.”

   He barked like a dog, trying to get under my skin.

   “The only way you’ll ever get that van back is if you report it stolen,” I told JJ when I talked to him later.

   “No, I can’t do that,” he said. “My dad would go to jail if I turned him in.”

    “Maybe that’s what he needs,” I said. “Maybe he needs to be behind bars for a while breaking rocks and thinking things through.” JJ and I both knew he would end up behind bars sooner or later, but whether he would turn things over was anybody’s guess. Jimmy was not especially a thinking kind of man. He was a cracking the corn kind of man.

Chasing Infinity

The Last Transylvanian

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BY Ed Staskus

   When Agnes Schaser lost her balance on the rolling deck of the SS Stuttgart as it steamed into New York Harbor in 1931 she was 22 years old. It was windy and raining. She had barely been able to make out the Statue of Liberty in the fog. She reached for and kept a firm grip on the arm of Mathias Schaser, her new husband. When she walked down the covered gangway she had, unbeknownst to her, a bun in the oven. The voyage had taken seven days. The first day on the ship had been a honeymoon. She had been seasick the next six days in a row. She was glad to get her land legs under her when she set foot on North American soil.

   Mathias had brown eyes, brown hair, and was five foot five. Agnes had blue eyes, brown hair, and was five foot three. He had emigrated from Transylvania to the United States midway through the Roaring Twenties and was naturalized in 1929. He did well for himself and when the day came he went back to his hometown of Hamlesch to fetch the girl he had been marking time to grow up. Their marriage had been arranged years before. Among the Transylvanian Saxons marriage was more of an economic contract than a romantic union. 

   He was born in 1888. She was born in 1909. He was twice her age. The difference didn’t matter to either of them. They were second cousins. The genealogy didn’t matter to their Lutheran brethren. A week before the wedding they  put on traditional folk costumes and went door-to-door inviting guests. Mathias carried a big wooden invitation stick. All the invitees brought food to the wedding feast, milk, butter, lard, and bacon. Every household brought one obligatory chicken. Women rolled out and cut dough for noodles. Many yeast cakes, called Handlich’s, were baked and topped with egg custard. Everybody was meant to get a slice.

   A wedding flag was decorated with tassels, ribbons, and kerchiefs. It was carried by a Fahnrich, Mathias’s closest friend, who led the wedding procession.  A ceremonial tree was crafted for the feast. It symbolized life and prosperity.  Mathias and Agnes exchanged vows in the big church in Hermannstadt, which was near their hometown. He wore a black suit. She wore a white dress. Agnes Kloos became Agnes Schaser on that day.

    Hermannstadt was one of the original seven Transylvanian Saxon towns. According to legend, the Pied Piper brought the towns to life with his flute. Fate leads everyone who follows it. He lured a hundred and thirty children from the German town of Hamelin with his tunes, led them into a mountain, and guided them underground the length of Europe until they finally emerged from a cave in Transylvania. The children separated into groups and founded the first seven Saxon towns in the land.

   All the towns in the Saxon lands of Transylvania were fortified. On top of that, all the churches were even more fortified. There were more than three hundred of the fortified churches throughout Transylvania, both Romanesque and Gothic, built of brick and stone, and most of them featuring a red tile roof. The village hall, school, and grain storage barns were clustered around the church. The churches were always built in the middle of town, often on a mound or a hill, with water tranches, multiple walls, and at least one tower. The tower was for observation, a warning bell, and for throwing rocks and pouring boiling oil on the heads of invaders. The fortified churches were the last refuge of the townsfolk.

   The Saxons came from the Low Countries and Germany, before there was a Romania. It wouldn’t become a country until the late 19th century. When they arrived it was a part of the Kingdom of Hungary. The colonization of Transylvania by Central Europeans, who later became known as Transylvanian Saxons, began during the reign of King Geza II in the 1140s. He recruited them to farm the valleys and exploit copper and iron ore mining in the northeast. 

   They were also expected to help defend against marauding steppe tribes. They weren’t successful against the Mongols, but learned their lesson. When the Ottoman Turks showed up, they were ready for them. They made their stand in their fortified towns and churches. After the Battle of Breadfield the Ottoman Turks complained to their God, but all he said was “Try again.” The Transylvanian Saxons thanked their God. It was every man for himself and God against all.

   Mathias and Agnes took a train from Bucharest to Berlin, made their way to Bremen, steamed up the Weser River, and crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Whenever Agnes wasn’t throwing up over the side, Mathias sat her down trying to teach her the English language. It was a slow go. They landed in New York City in mid-May, where they spent the rest of the week seeing the sights, going to the top of the newly built Empire State Building, strolling the length of Central Park, and feasting on Nathan’s hot dogs at Coney Island. On the Monday morning of the next week they took the Empire State Express to Cleveland’s Union Terminal.

   Until she got to Berlin, Agnes had never seen a train station bigger than a platform. Berlin was big, but she was struck dumb by New York City’s Grand Central Terminal. When she got to Cleveland she was struck again by the size of the train station there. More than two thousand buildings had been demolished in the early 1920s to make room for the underground station and the 52-story Terminal Tower built on top of it. It was at the time  the second-largest excavation project in the world, after the Panama Canal. When the Terminal Tower opened to its first tenants in 1928 it was the tallest skyscraper in North America outside of New York City. The Carpathian Mountains that surrounded Agnes’s homeland were large, but the United States was larger than life.

   Although she realized she might never see her family again, she was relieved to be gone from Transylvania, where trouble was brewing. The problem was, Transylvanian Saxons weren’t Romanians. The ethnic minority was one of the oldest German-speaking groups of the German diaspora. Before 1867 Transylvania had sometimes been autonomous and sometimes in union with Hungary. After the Compromise of 1867 it was incorporated into the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. When the uneasy royal alliance came to an end at the end of World War One, the Romanian majority in Transylvania clamored for unification with the Kingdom of Romania. The Treaty of Trianon in 1920 ratified it. The nationalist aspirations of the Romanians, however, ate away at the independence of the Transylvanian Saxons. The handwriting was on the wall.

   Saxons had been leaving Transylvania, regardless of the political turmoil, in sizable numbers since the late 19th century. Many of them emigrated to Cleveland, where they formed a fraternal organization called Erster Siebenburgen Sachsen Kranken Untersteutszung Verein, which meant First Transylvanian Saxon Sick Benefit Society. It was a mouthful no matter the language. The immigrants were determined to take care of their own. They purchased a sprawling old house on Denison Ave. in 1907 and converted it into what they called the Sachsenheim. They renovated it in 1925, adding two bowling alleys, a ballroom, a music room, a dining room, and a restaurant. They expanded the bar so more beer could be served.

   The married couple settled down on the west side of Cleveland, which was the side of town where most of the city’s Transylvanian Saxons lived. Mathias operated a corner store on Clark Ave., a fifteen minute walk from the Sachsenheim. He sold Big Hunks, Tootsie Rolls, and Chick-O-Sticks. There was chocolate galore. There was a soda counter and all the latest magazines. Agnes gave birth to their first son Harold at City Hospital. Everybody called the boy Hal. Mathias and Agnes scrimped and saved, setting money aside for a new house. She gave birth to their second son William in November 1933. Everybody called the boy Willie. Two days later, after the baby was safely delivered, her husband Mathias was shot twice in the chest at point-blank range. He died in the middle of the night in City Hospital where Agnes was still recovering from Willie’s birth.

   “You mustn’t stay here any longer,” Agnes had told her husband when he visited her earlier that day at City Hospital. She was supposed to stay in the hospital a few days more. “You go back to the store. We need to have more money now.” He went back to the store. He planned to return for his wife and child and bring them home by the end of the week.

   Two teenagers, Pete Wanach and Pete Hansinger, walked in when Mathias was closing the store for the night and demanded the day’s receipts. It was a hold up. When Mathias refused to give it to them, balling up his fists, one of them pulled a handgun and shot him dead. They scooped up all the bills and change in the till and fled. The Cleveland Police apprehended them soon enough. They were tried, found guilty of murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Ohio State Penitentiary. Pete Hansinger had a teenage wife who was pregnant. She gave birth soon after he started serving his life sentence,

   Pete Wanach offered Agnes a one hundred savings bond after his conviction. It was his way of saying sorry. She refused to take it. Pete Hansinger sent her a Christmas card from the penitentiary. She returned the favor every holiday season. “Maybe it will make him feel better,” she said.

   Needing a father for her two sons Agnes married again, tying the knot with Joe Levak, a Slovak from the east side. They moved to that side of town and rented a small house. She decorated the house with cheap landscapes from Woolworths and fine Bavarian China. She gave birth to two daughters one right after the other. The house was filled to the gills with life. She and her husband had their hands full. After five years of marriage Joe Levak dropped dead in 1940. Agnes never remarried. She raised her family on a Mother’s Pension, which was $90.00 a month, and piecework on the side.

   “I taught my sons to be forgiving, not to be bitter,” she said. “We got along all right. They started delivering newspapers when they were 10 years old. They finished high school even though they always worked part-time at a bakery.” On top of that, her sons had to play the violin. Agnes played it and her sons had to learn the instrument at her insistence, although Willie threw a temper tantrum and was soon excused.

   “You can’t carry a tune, anyway,” Hal, singing the blues, told his younger brother.

   Hal was 13 years old in 1944. His middle name was Mathias, the same as his father’s given name. It was an Indian summer day in October. He was walking home from his 7th grade class at Wilson Junior High School. He was looking forward to a bowl of potato tarragon soup. Agnes had brought the recipe from Transylvania. She made it with smoked ham. Hal was nearing his house when he was almost knocked off his feet by a thunderous blast. When he steadied himself and looked around, he saw roofs on fire.

   “It was like the sky blew up all at once, like blood and guts,” he said. Thick black smoke turned the day to night. Hal’s dog Buddy ran up the front steps and pawed at the door. Agnes bolted out of the house. Buddy ran into the house and straight down to the basement. Agnes’s daughters stood in the doorway bawling. Willie came running from the backyard. Hal ran to his mother on the front lawn. They all looked up at the red and black sky.

   The explosion and subsequent fires far and wide were caused when an East Ohio Gas liquefied natural gas storage tank started leaking. The gas flowed onto the concrete lot below the tank and began to vaporize. It turned into a thick white fog. It somehow ignited. It might have been a spark from a passing railcar or somebody lighting a cigarette. The deafening blast blew the tank and everything in sight of it to smithereens, starting with the two men working on top of it. 

   It happened at the foot of East 61st St. near the New York Central Railroad tracks. When the gas exploded it blew up at about twenty five million horsepower, the same as the combined output of all the hydroelectric plants west of the Mississippi River in 1944. One hundred year old oak trees were knocked down. Cleveland streets convulsed as far as four miles away. Flames reached 3,000 feet high and the heat reached 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Birds were turned to charcoal and fell out of the sky.

   Agnes and her children lived on East 66th St. and Lexington Ave., less than a mile from the East Ohio Gas tank farm. White ash trees on their street were on fire. Agnes was dead set on not losing her house. She started spraying garden hose water on it. From the front lawn she watched a tangled multitude of cars, busses, and Clevelanders on foot fleeing from the fire. Police, fire, and civil defense cars and trucks raced towards the fire, which was spewing gas, molten steel, and rock wool into the sky. 

   Housewives were caught unaware as flames spread through sewers and up their drains. When that happened, homes caught on fire. “I was getting ready to do some housework” said Alice Janos, one of Agnes’s neighbors. “Suddenly it seems like the walls turn all red. I look at the windows and the shades are on fire. The house fills with smoke. I think the furnace has blown up, but then I see smoke all around the neighborhood.”

   Gas ran into the streets, into the gutters, and down catch basins, igniting and blowing up wherever it pooled. Manhole covers were sent flying like bottle rockets. Utility poles bent in the heat. Fire trucks fell into sinkholes. Less than a half hour after the first explosion a second tank exploded. It knocked Agnes down, but she got back on her feet right away. Whenever things were going to hell she kept going. She had lost both her husbands. She was determined to not lose her house. She sprayed it with the garden hose until the water pressure turned to nothing. The land of dreams had turned into bad dreams, but her house was saved. The family didn’t have to shelter at Wilson Junior High. It was one of the schools where the Red Cross ended up taking in thousands of suddenly homeless men, women, and children. It was more than a week before children were able to go back to school.

   By Saturday morning the fire department had the inferno under control. In the afternoon, even though Agnes had told them to stay near the house, Hal and Willie went exploring. All the stop signs and traffic lights were gone, but there was no traffic, anyway. Soggy hulks of cars and trucks were pell-mell everywhere. Dogs sniffed at flotsam. Fire hoses littered every intersection.

   “What happened to this place?” Willie asked. “It’s a mess. Do you think it was the Martians?”

   “I don’t think it was the Martians,” Hal said. “Why would they come all this way to blow things up? Mom said it must have been Nazi sabotage.”

   “This wouldn’t have happened if Superman had been here,” Willie said.

   “Yeah, him and Captain America, too,” Hal said. “They got the moxie.”

   Agnes spent the weekend airing out the house, washing the curtains, beating the rugs, and clearing the front and back yards of debris. She swept clumps of ash into the street. When she was done her yard, at least, looked like not much had happened. The framed wedding picture of Mathias and her, taken in a photography studio in Hermannstadt in 1931, had fallen off the fireplace mantle. The glass was broken. She walked seven blocks where she found an open hardware store and replaced the glass. When she got home she gave her long-gone first husband a kiss and put the picture back on the mantle.

   Pete Wanach and Pete Hansinger, who had shot and killed Mathias Schaser, were paroled in 1955. They were middle-aged men by the time they were released. When Agnes was told the news she wished them well. “I have a happy life and my four children. I hope these men have changed and can find good jobs and become good citizens.” 

   Her life changed when she was compelled to sell her house in the early 1960s. She had fallen behind and her real estate taxes were in arrears, as well. The Transylvanian Saxons in her hometown of Hamlesch had a saying, “Et as Wasser am Brannen, awer em mess et schepen.” It meant, “There is water in the well, but one must scoop it up.” Her piecework on the side and Mother’s Pension only went so far. The water in the well was scraping the bottom. She started living with her children.

   “She lived with my father and mother after they were married, from before I was born,” her granddaughter Vanessa said. Agnes’s son Hal had married Terese Stasas, a Lithuanian girl from North Collinwood. Terese eventually put her foot down. “What’s the difference between a mother-in-law and a storm? You can wait out a storm until it passes. I got tired of waiting.” Agnes had to move in with a daughter instead of a daughter-in-law. 

    “After she moved, she visited us sometimes. One morning when I was three years old, she was making eggs for me. I was standing on a stool next to her telling her exactly how I wanted them done. I told her the whites should be cooked a certain way, and the yolks should be soft and pink, not orange. But I must have said too much because she suddenly turned, looked down at me, and said, ‘Halt die klappe!’”

   The little girl didn’t know German but knew exactly what her grandmother meant. Agnes had raised four children and buried two husbands in her time. She didn’t need or want a three-year-old telling her how to fry eggs. She had done all the cooking in her own home all her years and wasn’t in the mood for a food critic.

   Agnes Schaser died two years later. She was sixty years old. She had lived in Cleveland for thirty eight years. She was buried in an out of the way local cemetery. In the meantime, Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator of Romania, was scaling up his plan of moving the country’s Transylvanian Saxons to West Germany. His communist economy was struggling. He needed hard currency. West Germany was offering ransoms. By the early 1970s the plan evolved into a human trade agreement. Hundreds of millions of Deutschmarks were paid to the Romanian state and by 1990 a half million ethnic Germans, nearly all the descendants of who had long ago settled in the Southeastern European country, had been ransomed and there were no more Transylvanian Saxons.

Studio Photograph: Mathias Schaser and Agnes Kloos, 1931, Transylvania

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

“Bomb City”

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal. Revenge is always personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

School Days

Jack in the Box

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By Ed Staskus

   Even though my name isn’t Jack, that’s the name I go by.  My father was a big fan of Wild West movies back in the day. He named me after Wyatt Earp after he saw a movie about some gunfight at the OK Corral. I didn’t have any say about it until I reached the age of reason. My father wanted me to grow up and become a lawman, but we have agreed that is not going to happen. He’s disappointed, but I reminded him that when you have expectations, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.

   I wake up on school days before everybody else, while they are snoring their heads off, stare at the ceiling in the dark, wonder whether the sun did or didn’t explode in the night, and mess around with Blackie. He’s my cat that sleeps at my feet. Sometimes he curls up under my arm with his face pressed into my armpit. I wonder how he even breathes. I shouldn’t wonder, though, since he’s the Chuck Norris of everything that goes on in the neighborhood. Nothing messes with him twice, especially since I never trim his claws.

   When it’s time to rise and shine I throw on sweats. I like going outside first thing, so I always do that right after I get out of bed. Otherwise, somebody would tell me to do something else. Most mornings I walk Scar, our Beagle, although he won’t go out in the rain. We stay on the back porch and chill when it rains. We got him from the Animal Protective League. He’s like a hound with short legs and long ears. He has a bad habit of biting strangers. I never interfere with that. A dog’s got to do what a dog’s got to do. He’s got a chase reflex, too, especially if they’re squirrels, cats, or any dog smaller than him. 

   We jog down Riverside Dr. to Hogsback Ln. and into the Rocky River Metropark, but I have to keep my eyes peeled, because if he sees a badger in the park it’s all over. He doesn’t believe it’s a revenge obsession, but he’s deluded. He got torn up when he was still a puppy. There was a badger with cubs in our backyard, behind the garage, and Scar got too close to them. There was an explosion of yelps, screeches, and barking when it happened. His face was ripped open and we had to rush him to the Animal Clinic.

   I used to eat breakfast with my parents, even though there was always something. “Take your elbows off the table and pass the ketchup. Did you do your homework? Is that a clean shirt?” There would be a quiz about what I did yesterday and what I was going to be doing today. They hardly eat together anymore, anyway. Both of them are always in a hurry to get to work, even though my dad hates his job because of the toads whose business it is. My stepmom teaches at the new middle school down the street. She loves it because she can boss everybody around and make big money doing it. She talks about her paycheck and pension all the time. She made sure all of our neighbors voted her way when a school tax levy was on the ballot last year. Most of them did. She’s not friends with those who didn’t vote her way anymore.

   The first thing I do after I’ve showered and gotten dressed for school is call the Red Door Deli and order a Bagel Bacon Bagel Special. There’s a Chinaman who works there. He has a thick accent. My father is down on immigrants, even though his parents were immigrants, but the Chinaman makes a mean bacon bagel, so he’s in my good book.

   “Hallo!”

   I’m, like, “Hi.”

   “Yes?”

   “I want to order a Bagel Bacon Bagel Special.”

   When he repeats my order, I can barely understand him. “That’s right,” I always say no matter what he says. Everybody there knows me, but he pretends it’s the first time he’s ever talked to me, even though he answers the phone every morning. He’s the one who hands me my bagels at the counter, too.

   The Red Door Deli is across the street from St. Edward High School in Lakewood, in a pint-sized strip shopping center, squeezed between Bubbles, a pit stop for dirty laundry, and Sassy Beauty, a hair salon. I go to the deli every morning and since they know me my main man just hands me my paper bag without a word and I fork over my three dollars.

   What time I get there for my bagels depends, although it’s never later than eight o’clock. It depends on Noah’s father, who drives both of us to school. Noah lives next door. His father works at a garden center in Avon, even though their yard isn’t any better than ours, which is surprising. Noah calls my cell phone when they’re ready to go and I run right over.

   “Pick it up, pick it up,” his father grumbles, shrugging his way into their F-150 Raptor. He always sounds peeved about something, like he’s going to bite my head off if I look at him the wrong way. He drops us off at the Red Door Deli. I get my breakfast. Noah and I walk across the street to school.

   The cafeteria is at the back of the building, which is the new part of the school. We cross the street, squeeze between the chapel and main classroom, and go in through a side door. Our chapel is boss, topped with a gold dome, just like Notre Dame. You can see it from blocks away. It glows in the sun.

   Every morning there are loads of guys in the cafeteria. The TV’s are all on and everybody is watching whatever, which is mostly the news. The flat screens are on every wall except the far wall with the windows. There’s destruction and disaster every morning on the FOX Morning Show, major scariness everywhere, but it doesn’t mess with anybody’s breakfast.

   My father, stepmom, and Billy watch FOX News every night. They agree among themselves that every word the talking heads say is true. It’s doing to them what they say video games are doing to me. It’s making them slow and stupid. What they don’t know is video games make me fast and smart, although my stepmom doesn’t want to hear  it. I’ll leave her in the dust soon enough.

   I wouldn’t want to be on the news being body slammed while inside an airplane hitting a hillside. It’s an instant emergency room, all broken bones. It only takes a second, but forever can happen in a second. Everybody’s so burned up and busted to pieces that dentists have to be brought in to find out who is who.

   One day there was major terrorist news that caught my eye, except it wasn’t on the news. It was on the internet. It was too gruesome for the news. Towelheads captured some scruffy looking people and wouldn’t let them go. It was holy war time. They tied them to posts and blindfolded them. They shot them one at a time, although they didn’t shoot to kill. They shot them in the legs. Then they went back and shot them in the arms. The internet loves blood and guts.

   Our military is totally rad and could take them out, but nobody is going to win that war. It’s an epic fail over there. It’s been going on forever. I hope they try to come here. We would rumble on their butts. It’s cammo, ammo, and Rambo. Our family has plenty of guns in the attic and we have plenty of ammunition, too. I’m not sure about everything we have, though. Billy is the only one who knows for sure.

   “I have two 12-gauge’s, a semi-automatic pistol, a .22 Sig Sauer, a big bore 14-gauge, and an AK-47 semi-automatic,” Billy says, looking full of himself. “I have more, but the rest of it isn’t any of your business.”

   Billy is like that. He’s my older half-brother. He lives on the third floor and doesn’t let anybody in his room. It’s under lock-and-key, starting with his bedroom door. My stepmom is good with it. It wouldn’t be good for me if I tried it. He wears tight-fitting clothes and goes to Cleveland State University. He wants to be a policeman or an army man. He’ll be gone in two or three years. I can’t wait for that to happen.

   His arsenal is technically my father’s, because he bought most of it, but they’re totally my half-brother’s. Billy buys guns for himself now that he’s turned eighteen and become an adult. Before that he wasn’t allowed. He was still a child. He says he’s grown up now. He says lots of things.

   We go shooting on my grandfather’s farm in Michigan. Our family goes to the farm every summer to visit my stepmom’s family. My grandfather says that whenever anybody says you don’t need a gun, you’d better make sure you have one that works. Anything other than the Second Amendment sticks in his craw. “They always want to take guns away from the people who didn’t do it,” he says. Last summer I shot so many rounds off at the farm, at targets, at trees, even at nothing, that I got a blister on my hand.

   I have my own gun, although it’s not exactly a real one. It’s a G & G Carbine air soft gun. It’s not real, but it looks, feels, and  acts like the real deal. It shoots BB’s instead of bullets. Ted Nugent said the BB gun is the most important gun in the history of American weaponry. He should know. He has his own name brand BB’s. Air soft ammo is plastic, not metal. They leave a welt when they smack skin.

   My father bought it for me. He didn’t tell my stepmom. He gets nitpicked on a daily basis. It’s not from Target or anyplace like that. It cost almost four hundred dollars. My friends, Nick and Jake, and I use Grudge Tactical pellets when we’re out shooting each other. The pellets are coated with powder, so they leave a mark on your clothes. 

   Nobody talks about guns at St. Ed’s, not us, and not our teachers. Even though everybody runs guns down, when they say anything at all, Mr. Rote, our religion teacher, told us self-defense is in the Good Book and told us about St. Aquinas and taking care of business. Mr. Rote said it’s best to shoot first and ask questions later. He said the Dalai Lama says the same thing. Nobody asked him who that was, since nobody cared about any Lama.

   “It’s your responsibility to defend your faith, your family, and your country,” he said. “It’s a duty to defend church and country from evil men.” He didn’t say much more than that. He plays the guitar. He’s probably never had a gun in his hands his whole life. What does he know? We don’t have metal detectors at St. Ed’s like they do at public schools, but if anyone ever brought a gun to our school that would be the end. They would be expelled and never be allowed back.

   You can wear pajamas to public school, but at St. Ed’s we have to wear a dress shirt and tie, pressed pants, and black shoes. You can’t even have too much style in your hair. When you’re in a Catholic school there’s more expected of you. If you’re a St. Ed’s man everybody expects you to be a good person. What you do in public school is up to you, which isn’t always a good thing. Not everybody is a good kid, no sir. There are plenty of rotten apples.

   When I was in middle school big kids would make fun of small kids with learning disabilities. They picked on the younger specimens. They would walk right up to them, start being mean, and push them around. They would go after the ones with ADHD or Tourette’s, edge on them, and make fun of them.

   From sixth grade on it was all about bullying kids who were shy or different, especially in gym class. There was a posse, led by Tristan and Justin. They were complete dirtbags. I would try to help, as long as the monsters weren’t there, the ones who say they don’t punch you in the back, they punch you in the face.

   “You shouldn’t act up like that,” I told them whenever I could.

   “Shut up.”

   “Leave them alone, make fun of somebody else.”

   “Yeah, sure, beat it.”

   They wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t like they were in class, so they could keep doing it and doing it. They thought they were so superior. That’s how they got the stupid kids to like them. That’s the thing about Catholic schools and public schools. Guys don’t do that at Catholic schools. I’m sure some do, but not like that. So many public school kids are dipsticks. They learn to think by watching cartoons. 

   If a teacher at a Catholic school got wind of bullying like that there would be no problem seeing the trouble you were in. All hell would break loose. When you’re in a Catholic school there’s a lot more expected of you. You’re expected to be a better person. You have to take charge of yourself and take the bull by the tail. It’s a big change when you leave public school for good. I didn’t go to a parochial grade school. I went to a public grade school. I didn’t have eight years of dress rehearsal. It was a big change for me.

   The food is better at St. Ed’s than it is at public schools, where it’s mostly grown in boxes and cans. Their cooks carry X-Acto knives instead of spatulas. At St. Ed’s we have real cooks and we’re served real food, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. No sugar drinks are allowed. The milk is low fat. It doesn’t pay to be fat at St. Ed’s. It’s the Breakfast of Champions, but I still bring my Bagel Bacon Bagel Special most mornings, because we don’t get enough food.

   There are rules about everything, even about how many calories we’re allowed. I don’t get enough for cross-country and the football players always complain about their portions. Football is the most important thing at St. Ed’s. Everybody knows where the goalposts are. We won states last year, so this year we are the defending state champions.

   When school started in the fall we were 5th in the USA Today poll and 6th in the ESPN poll. That’s in the whole country, not just Ohio. That’s how good we are. At St. Ed’s it’s either football season or it’s waiting for football season. We say it’s faith, family, and touchdowns. Sometimes it almost seems like it means more than Heaven and Hell. It puts pep in everybody’s step when we win. I tried football in grade school, but it didn’t work out. I was more bantam than bulky and then I broke my collarbone. Now I love running.

   The football players boycotted lunch one day. It was a big stir. My friend Rick, who is a 6-foot-3-inch 220-pound linebacker, said he burns more than 3,000 calories during three hours of weight training and practice after school. “We are getting hungry even before the practice starts,” he told one of the vice-principals. “Our metabolisms are all sped up.”

   “I could not be more passionate about this,” the food supervisor said, making a speech the next day before lunch. Grown-ups are always making speeches, masterminds on their soapboxes. “I want to solve this problem,” she said, looking smug and serious. She had everybody fill out cards about what we did and didn’t like about our meals. We all laughed about it. Everybody knew nothing was going to change. They’re always trying to put it over on us with their plans and schemes. Grown-ups do what’s good for them, not for anybody else, not even other grown-ups.

   They got our cafeteria right. It is the nicest one I’ve ever seen. There are skylights over the atrium, polished wood floors, oblong tables, and ergonomic chairs. Everything is super modern. Somebody’s father died and gave the school a ton of money, millions of it, as soon as he was six feet under. He was probably trying to make it up to God about something. The whole school is up-to-date, even though it was built in 1949, on land that used to be a feeding stop for cattle trains. Back then if you got a detention you had to help dig out the new basement with a shovel. Punishment was about being blue collar for a day, made to work with your hands. St. Edward High School in 2011 isn’t about working with your hands, unless it’s tapping on a keyboard in the computer lab.

   When I check the time on my cell phone and it’s 8:25 I wolf down what’s left of my Bagel Bacon Bagel Special and pop up fast because my first class is at 8:30. Being late for Mr. Rote’s Roman Catholic religion class would be the worst thing I could do to start my day. If I did there would be crime and punishment. When we hit the hallway it’s every freshman for himself and the almighty against all.

Excerpted from “School Days.”

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

“Bomb City”

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal. Revenge is always personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Our Daily Bread

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

   “Come on mom, we’re not stupid.”

   “Good,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Chasing Infinity

On the Warpath

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Dancing With the Stars

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hell’s Kitchen”

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

A crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Working Side of the Altar

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

   I asked my mother for the note after I was out of the tub, in pj’s, and my book bag was ready for the coming up Monday morning. I wanted it to be short and sweet, as though it were no big deal, routine, really. I thought pleading something along the lines of all my spare time already being spent on my studies would be the way to go. I knew I was walking a thin line, though. My parents wanted me to be an altar boy. They went to mass every Sunday, which meant we all went. “Everybody went to church back then,” according to my mother. “There were two masses every Sunday. The church was full of people. We went early to get a pew.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

   How could that be? What happened between last night and now?  I suddenly realized my own mother had monkey wrenched me. When I asked her about it, she said, “As a mother I do the possible and leave the impossible to God.” I had heard God helps those who help themselves, and had spoken up for myself by telling my mother that learning Latin for the mass was going to be a stretch since I was still trying to master English, but that seemed to leave her unfazed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Not Fade Away

Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

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

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Saving Ernest Hemingway

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By Ed Staskus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “How is your head?” Frank asked.

   “My head hurts,” Ernest Hemingway said.

   “You might have a concussion.”

   “I probably do.”

   “Have you had one before?”

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

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

   “Do you have a headache?’

   “Yes.”

   “Are you dizzy at all?”

   “Yes.”

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

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

   “Are you sensitive to the light?”

   “Yes.”

    “Let me stand you up for a second.”

   “All right.”

   “How’s your balance?”

   “Not very good.”

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

   “I need a drink.”

   “That would be a bad idea.”

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

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

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

    “How is he?”

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

   “Are you a doctor?”

   “Yes.”

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

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

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

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

   “Is he fit enough to travel?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hell’s Kitchen” 

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

Available on Amazon and Apple Books

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication