The Cruel War

Friday Dawn

I am as happy as I have been in quite a while.

By happy perhaps I mean “not afraid or worried.”

Perhaps also “satisfied.”

Perhaps satisfaction is enough.

Perhaps I cannot expect more than that.

My joints are all sore. Why?

My right hand still aches from the Amsterdam affair.

Maybe my aching bones were jolted at the time, and they are just now manifesting their displeasure.

It is Thursday night. While I watched On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a couple inches of snow descended stealthily. When I arose and went to the door to let the dogs out, the world was yet again covered in white—like the powdered sugar on the Greek wedding cookies in the metal tin I just opened.

There is a full moon working her way out of a broken cloud.

It is a quiet night. Stille Nacht.

I want to go with you
No one will ever know
Won’t you let me come with you
No, my love, no.

I bought the 45-rpm of that folk song by Chad and Jill when it came out a lifetime ago. I never realized that “Chad” was the Chad of Chad and Jeremy. I had some of their 45s as well.

I’ll tie back my hair
Men’s clothing I’ll put on
I’ll pass as your comrade
as we march along

I’ll pass as your comrade
No one will ever know
Won’t let me come with you
No, my love, no.

I don’t know how that earworm got into my head. When I was about 10, I thought that was the most beautiful song I’d ever heard.

Oh Johnny, oh Johnny, I fear you are unkind
I love you far better than all of mankind.
I love you far better than words can e’re express
Won’t you let me go with you?
Yes, my love, yes.

Yes, my love, yes.

The Cruel War is raging, Johnny has to fight
I want to be with him from morning to night.
I want to be with him, it grieves my heart so,
Won’t you let me go with you?
No, my love, no.

I’ll tie back my hair, men’s clothing I’ll put on,
I’ll pass as your comrade, as we march along.
I’ll pass as your comrade, no one will ever know.
Won’t you let me go with you?
No, my love, no.

Tomorrow is Sunday, Monday is the day
That your Captain will call you and you must obey.
Your captain will call you it grieves my heart so,
Won’t you let me go with you?
No, my love, no.

Oh Johnny, oh Johnny, I fear you are unkind
I love you far better than all of mankind.
I love you far better than words can e’re express
Won’t you let me go with you?
Yes, my love, yes.

Yes, My Love, Yes.

The cruel war raged all around here 160 years ago. Gettysburg, just a couple dozen miles further up the ridge of mountains I live upon, was July first, second and third 1863. The quiet little town saw almost 200,000 combatants fill their fields. By the third day, there were about 50,000 casualties—mostly men. Jenny Wade, shot while working at the stove in her kitchen, was unlucky enough to get in the way of a stray bullet that came through her kitchen door.

All are long gone now. Only stone monuments and statues, miles of split-rail fences marking fallow fields and graves—that’s all that remains.

What did the people living on these still rural Maryland roads think of huge armies moving through their fields and lanes?

I want to be with you
It grieves my heart so
Won’t you let me go with you
No, my love, no.

And I am so tired. Tired every night. Not from any special exertion.

My new baseline?

Tired.

Sore.

Satisfied.

At least there is no trouble sleeping as there had been during the COVID years.

Tired. Sore. Satisfied.

And resigned.

The movie tonight. It was the oddball James Bond. George Lazenby’s only effort. I guess I always tossed it off as being bad because he got fired after the one movie. Actually, I thought it was excellent tonight. Diana Rigg was stunning as well as witty and very athletic for the action role. Small-minded of me…

No. I am resigned.

Telly Savalas was dastardly. Mrs. Moneypenny was full of longing. Lazenby was great as Bond. Debonair and deadly.

So tired…

It would be so very easy to roll onto my side, curl up, wrapping my arms around a pillow and drift away.

So easy to float away until morning. Well, likely not that “late.” 5 a.m. is morning. 4:59 a.m. is “night.”


It is Friday, January 17th. I am glad the laptop did not slip off the bed and crash to the floor overnight. It is more than halfway through this cold hard cruel month.

Friday Dawn

Pippin awoke me with a coughing fit around 3. “Ack Ack Ack Ack…” He is in good spirits and very active.

The furnace was humming softly. I noticed the fire had died down. I failed to bank it before slipping off to dreamland. The big black canvas tote was empty, deflated on the floor next to the stove.

My soul is trained to rebel at the sound of the furnace running. It is not the money. It is the lifestyle I lead. Long ago at the stone farmhouse in Gettysburg, it WAS the money. Filling the oil tank was about $300. A huge sum in the early 1980s. For me anyway. We were still selling paperbacks for a quarter, I think. I lived in an early 19th-century stone farmhouse a couple of miles from the battlefield from 1980 til 1990. It was a hard life. No money.

So much work.

So I slipped into my Danish clogs and carried the tote out onto the snow-covered driveway. It was cold. But not the brutal teens of much of this month. Fetching wood at 3 a.m. In the snow. In sweats and a t-shirt…

Is that pathologic?

I had trouble falling back to sleep. “Ack Ack Ack…”

I should have put earplugs in.

I called the vet yesterday, asking if steroids might help Pip. I have not heard back.

Thursday started with a visit to a new eye doctor. Actually, it began with the tree people arriving early. I was hurrying to get ready when I heard the big truck rumbling up the driveway. I’d tucked my vehicles away so they could turn the thing around on the landing zone at the top of the drive. I rushed out so they would not start setting up or whatever they were planning. Giles was going with me. Too cold to leave him outside all day.

“You need to get out?” I was asked.

Maybe that was why I had the Jeep’s rear opened and was urging Giles to jump in?

They turned their truck around and headed down again. But I think they needed to because they wanted to back it up the drive. Anyway, their second truck was approaching when our little caravan got down to the bottom. I pulled onto my neighbor’s drive so they could pass back up.

Interesting…

The new doctor’s office was small and hard to find in the complex on TJ Drive.

“Why are you here?”

“I don’t know.”

I really did not know.

Then I explained the other eye doctors and the referral that my regular doctor thought might help my peace of mind.

He did a bunch of tests, as did a couple of assistants.

“I’m not seeing anything,” the doctor said. He had a wonderful calm demeanor. “What did they say you had?”

I recited my eye history. The driver’s license renewal eye test I flunked. The Walmart optometrist with the German accent measuring me for driving glasses.

“There is nothing wrong with your distance vision. I think the DMV eye-test machine must have been dirty. Take this back to them, and they will remove the restriction,” she told me firmly. “But I see something else, and I want you to see an ophthalmologist.”

I had no symptoms. I have never had any symptoms. 8 years of no symptoms. But apparently I had some diabolical pressure that could cause me to go blind suddenly. The ophthalmologist eventually used a laser to shoot tiny holes in the internal walls of my eyes to relieve the pressure.

I returned twice a year til now. Never heard there was anything except the usual wear and tear.

Then that doctor retired, and the confusion started.

The new-new doctor was confused, I think. “I will get your records from both other doctors and see you in a month.”

Good news! I thought when I left that office… I think.

And today and tomorrow the temperature will rise to 40. It is like a false spring has dropped in.

I will take what I can get.

The two legal things?

One I will likely get “indemnified” on.

The other which has been hovering like the Sword of Damocles for over two months is maybe on the way to settlement. I hope something reasonable and not the crazy stuff I’d heard was going to be sought.

The contractor has cleaned up the dockyard.

Cleaned Dockyard

Tons of rusted and rotted “stuff” has been hauled away and recycled. An ugly eyesore burden has been swept clear.

And the books… oh, the books! Such a happy, torturous, impossible, glorious, unending burden…

And the conversation with my longtime doctor late last Friday afternoon—a tele-appointment—went very well. He talked me off the doom cliff, and now I feel hopeful I will outlive my organs and problems…

…as long as I don’t go down the rabbit holes—both externally contrived and internally fabricated and fostered.

Maybe I will dress up today. Put on normal clothes as opposed to the Dickensian winter rags I have been wearing to keep the cold away. (And to hide—as if in disguise.)

Maybe I will go out for a fancy martini after work. It would be good to return to the land of the living.


The dawn saw the horizon as a swathe of burnt orange.

The flock of songbirds on the porch roof are all just black silhouettes. Their colors and features won’t appear until the sun rises, and its bright light will define them.

Songbirds

It is Tuesday. I hope it is better than Monday was.

The flames are dancing gaily in the windows of the woodstove.

Warmth. A good thing.

The holidays are just a memory. Designed, I think, to give humans a running start to get through the black cold long dark nights of the rest of winter.


The howls woke me before four. The winds are back. 17 degrees, and the snow, softened by 40-degree warmth a couple days ago, has hardened to hard crusty, icy frosting. When I step on it, fetching wood, my feet do not sink in. Shiny black patches, lit by bright moonlight, belie the wet puddles they appear to be. Hard black ice—slick traps for incautious treads. There’s safety in my bed, beneath piles of cotton and wool. Walls and windows and a woodstove protect me. But I can peer out from my soft fortifications at the forest swaying and flailing in a mad dance. Why the trees all do not crack, split and fall, I do not know. They certainly creak and groan as the winds toss the mighty forest like wheat in a field.

To be cast out in this weather like Lear in his storm would be death before long.

Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children,
You owe me no subscription: then let fall
Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join’d
Your high engender’d battles ‘gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! ’tis foul!

Protect me warmth and walls and woolens and wood fire. I would not perish in such discomfort.


The week continues to vaporize into wasted time and effort. Meetings. Lawyers. Doctors. Forms.

People…

At this point, I far prefer books. They are as constant as the north star.

Thursday morning. 15 degrees. The woodstove glowing. The furnace running. The tree people coming soon.

I’ve been so tired and fried every night I haven’t gotten anything done around the house.

Until last night. I forced myself to fire up the Husqvarna chainsaw and cut the pile of wood outside my door.

There’s been too much snow and ice on and around for 10 days or so.

Good. Now I have maybe a week or ten days of firewood just steps away and not all the way out in the barn.

And there was a glorious dawn just now.

Glorious Dawn

That picture is not enhanced. In fact, the colors and definition were far better than the iPhone camera can capture.

A brutal winter. After a brutal second half of 2024.


Friday at work.

The drive was slippery coming down. I’d left the truck at work. White knuckles. I should have just stayed in bed and wrote. Last Saturday, I had to plow as well.

Four plowing events in the first half of January.

This may be the shortest Friday story ever.

The contractor is in the office screwing on new doorstops. The ancient ones left by the post office have worn out. The doors often slide closed of their own accord.

“RRRRRRRRooooouuurrrrrr”

Trying to write with a screw-gun symphony going on next to me.

Here are just a handful of books that caught my attention in the past week.

A Pope signature?

Pope Signature?

And…

Cautionary Verses

Beautiful Losers

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The Romance of London

Sherlock Holmes: A Play


And here’s a preview of a new Round and Round story. (If I post it a “preview”, it may make me feel guilty enough to write the thing.)

Round and Round

That Christmas was over, there could be no doubt. Not a flash of tinsel nor a crinkle of colored paper nor a twist of red or green ribbon remained in any nook of the old bookstore. The brown wreath made of woven wine vines and assorted pine cones had been lifted off its hook under the gable of the front porch and been boxed and set on a top shelf in the storeroom. Next to in a box marked boldly “Xmas” the creche was packed. The figures were carefully wrapped in tissue paper. They rested inside the manger made of wood and moss.

The creche had been old when the bookseller was a little boy. His mother had let him unpack it and set it up on the walnut chest in the living room. The figures were heavy. Most certainly cast plaster and painted by an Italian hand in the 19th century. The ox and the ass and the lambs. Mary, Joseph, the three kings, the shepherd with his crook, each had a place in or near the manger. And, of course, the baby Jesus on his bed of straw would be handed to his mother. She would put it away until Christmas Eve, when she would give it to the little boy to place between the adoring Madonna and Joseph.

Yes, any thoughts of next Christmas would be ten months away.

It had been a happy Christmas. Annirosa and Althea had both returned.

“The baby snallygasters fledged,” was all Althea would say about her extended absence. Annirosa had stated that the latest conclave had ended and that she had resigned her position at the head of the dais.

Even Barbara had flown in and made an appearance.

“I have brought pfeffernussen,” she stated matter-of-factly, setting a big basket woven out of willow wands. “The pecans in them are from the southern border. It gives me pleasure to harvest them. When I was a little girl, we had a small grove of the nut trees on our farm in New Germany.”

“New Germany? Where is that?”

“When was that would be more apt,” she replied and said no more. “Now put some milk on the stove while I go look for some books to take along when I return to the ramparts. Dark forces are stirring beyond the walls out in the wasteland. I must return and stand guard. There are not many of us left, you know. Each of us must take longer and longer shifts.”

With that, she turned and disappeared down an aisle.

‘You’d think she could find books anywhere in the world she goes,’ the bookseller thought.

“Or beyond,” Annirosa said aloud, finishing the man’s thought. “But there is something different about the finds here, here at the center of things.”

“Center of things? Here? This is the quietest part of the quietest town in the quietest state in the quietest region in the…”

“Yes. As I said. At the center of things. It is where the heart is that all is protected and safe. We expend a great deal of effort to keep it so. Now, I hope you have some fresh milk.”

“Always. Matilda insists on it. A bowl in the morning when I arrive. Another in the evening after all is closed and shuttered.”

“Quite so. And is there a clean pot?”

“I’ll go check,” by which the bookseller meant he would slip into the pantry and quickly wash the dishes. He’d been busy with the holidays and the dog and cat were of no help in scullery work. He reached in the basket and extracted a cookie before he left the counter. A step away, he took a bite. The powdered sugar dissolved like a cloud of sweet crystals in his mouth. The flavor flowed through him, and he had to pause to catch his breath before he took a second step. It was then his teeth closed upon the nuts inside the baked good. With that, his second step seemed to take him into an enchanted forest. Spanish moss hung in long curtains from the trees’ branches. A bird took flight high above, and in its wake, a contrail of silver sparks fell and dissipated before reaching the forest floor.

“Oh! That’s some cookie!” he said aloud before his senses returned to the bookstore, and he continued toward his chore.

When he returned to the front, he asked Althea, “Do you think she’d give me the recipe?”

“Impossible,” she replied matter-of-factly.

“Well, that’s not very friendly. Nor is it in the holiday spirit. I’d sign a non-disclosure agreement if she wanted.”

Althea guffawed. (He’d missed her snarky insults and deprecating humor.) “No. I mean impossible. The ingredients cannot be acquired here.”

“Well, I can order anything on the internet.”

“I mean, any of these ingredients cannot be ordered anywhere, anywhere on this sphere.”

He laughed. “Cookies from another dimension, eh? Well, they do have quite a kick.”

As he crossed the threshold into the little pantry, the thought occurred to him. ‘Those were pecan trees—like the grove my dad’s family had in Texas all those years ago. I was just a little kid the last time I saw it…’ He sighed. ‘Grandma would always send a little sack of pecans to us at Christmas time. Texas seems like such an exotic place to a kid living in the suburbs in western New York. Cowboys, armadillos, horses, rattlesnakes, roadrunners… jackalopes!’ He chuckled aloud.

When he got into the pantry, it was spotless. The sink was empty, the counters polished and shining—everything in its place.

“‘A place for everything and everything in its place,’ Mom used to say. I shouldn’t be surprised though. Three women suddenly visiting and each with… special ‘talents?'”

He pulled out a large saucepan from the oak cabinet and poured four cups of milk into it. Matilda, the cat, would want her milk heated, and Setanta, the enormous red Irish wolfhound, wouldn’t be interested. “He can join us in celebration with a saucer of Irish whiskey.”

Then Althea and Annirosa appeared in the pantry and began rooting around for platters and bowls.

“What are we doing?”

“Having a party,” Annirosa said.

“Or a wake,” Althea added.

“Is that what brought you back?” the bookseller asked.

Before they could answer, Setanta came in, and the room got much smaller. Matilda slipped in on cat’s paws and began doing figure eights around the bookseller’s legs.

“Mom used to say the kitchen was always the most popular part of home.”

They’d all come because of Owain’s death.

12 Comments on Article

  1. ken karmiole commented on

    George Lazerby was one of my close neighbors, now moved into a board and care facility. I would see him often and chat with him at a local Italian restaurant. He did a great job in his one James Bond movie. You probably know the story about his continuing in the roll of Bond which he was offered but his agent told him to pass on. I have more details but what a mistake on his part.

    1. Charles Roberts replied on

      Great to hear from you Ken.
      Excellent anecdote!
      I hope the agent was fired!
      Best
      Chuck

  2. Gregory commented on

    Hi, Chuck. I did a review of all the earlier Bond movies a few years back. I thought that Lazenby was ok, but obviously the audience did not accept him. My real problem was that I felt that the direction of the film was very bad in places, especially the action scenes. That is something that is so much improved in the more recent ones. The editing was confusing, and there was a real lack of excitement. This didn’t help Lazenby’s case, I’m sure.

    Good luck with your eyes. It’s a good idea to keep up with all your checkups with them, as you don’t want anyone to say later, “If you’d only come in earlier…” Ack!

    1. Charles Roberts replied on

      I’m still not sure what the new and “new new” eye doctors were getting at.
      I think my new new new doc is really good. Yep – twice a year for many years and so far … knock wood.
      Maybe I didn’t notice the faults. Rigg was just … the perfect woman. And the ending is so sad!
      Maybe it just felt “new” since I’ve ignored it when I periodically rewatch the opus.
      I thought Roger Moore was the weakest. I like him but felt he was more comedian that cynical spy.
      The set I’m going through has interviews w Fleming which I don’t recall seeing. Pretty fascinating.
      Looking it up I was unaware or forgot Lazenby was offered to continue the role but was advised not to.
      Thanks for writing! Stimulating!
      Chuck

  3. Deb commented on

    Your Mom’s wisdom resonates ~ the kitchen is the heart of the home and where everyone wants to be.

    A place for everything and everything in it’s place makes life good. Always.

    1. Charles Roberts replied on

      Mom could get grumpy if it was too crowded or if some of the brothers or dad started sampling things that weren’t ready.

      I aspire for “everything in its place”. Sadly there’s too much stuff in my workalike and at home. (Though I have downsized a LOT in the latter).

      Thank you so much for commenting!
      Chuck

  4. Susan Centineo commented on

    What a delightful read first thing in the morning with my coffee and my cat curled obtrusively on my desk (after walking back and forth ten times between my face and this screen). Loved it all. Thank you!

    1. Charles Roberts replied on

      That is so kind!
      Say hi to your cat.
      Thank you for commenting.
      Best
      Chuck

  5. Jack Walsh commented on

    Enjoyed the story.
    Growing up in Philadelphia the Kitchen was the most popular place in the house. When we visited relatives, all the activity was in the kitchen. And when people visited us, everyone sat in the kitchen to talk and laugh.
    That tradition seems to be replaced by the “family room” now and it is just not the same.

    1. Charles Roberts replied on

      Thank you!
      The kitchen could get pretty crowded and that made mom grumpy sometimes.
      Best
      Chuck

  6. David Holloway commented on

    “And the books… oh, the books! Such a happy, torturous, impossible, glorious, unending burden…”

    What a delightful description of the life of a bookseller!!

    1. Charles Roberts replied on

      Thanks David!
      Great to hear from you
      Chuck

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