Cleaning House

So what do I do with the Nazi flag?

Cousin Bobby told us to take it - before someone came upon it, folded and faded in the attic, and didn't understand the story behind it.

We said we'd take it home to Elkins Park, where I am reluctant to fly it, for good reason. He never told us how he happened to grab it. But he shared a few war memories when we were standing guard at the hospital, keeping him company this spring as he slowly slipped away.

Before his words turned too chaotic, he left us with a haunting story. I'm not sure if it was France or Belgium, but it was 1944, the year he was to have graduated from Harvard. There he was face-to-face with a young German soldier, guns trained, hearts pounding, just the two of them.

"I knew that if I didn't shoot him, he'd shoot me," Bobby recalled.

The seconds ticked, but no one shot. Bobby lowered his rifle an inch. The German lowered his rifle an inch. For some reason, neither was interested in killing the other, even though this was soon after Normandy, and there was plenty of hardened hatred on all sides.

"I thought for a moment that he might have a mother," Bobby told Mimi in the hospital.

I can't imagine what it must have been like for such a sensitive soul to find himself an infantryman in the Huertgen Forest. He'd wind up hit twice, the second time the most serious. He was evacuated to England. As a boy I'd marvel at the indentations in his tanned belly. Some of his toes were twisted. Those were the wounds one could see. He only talked about the war to us a couple times over the years.

Cleaning out his place this past weekend, I came upon old v-mails from the front, his 9th Infantry photo, and a shot of him on crutches in Birmingham where he looks lean and hungry. He's wearing small glasses and his hair is longish and wavy. He looks like my son Gordon.

In his desk drawer I found a bunch of his old anti-war buttons. These are Vietnam vintage protests - "Stop The War," "Wage Peace" - as well as jabs at Judge Julius Hoffman of the Chicago 7 trial ("Screw Magoo") and a bunch of books that I do know what to do with: "Naked Lunch," "Candy," and a paperback of Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer," with the white-paper wrapper still intact. I will put them on my shelf and think of this "traditional radical" as he called himself for the rest of my days.

But what do I do with the Nazi flag?

Balls & Strikes

Welcome to the shadow blog.

Red Sox Win

It was a couple days after the Red Sox won the World Series when I reached my cousin Bobby, aged 80, who was back in his Sharon, Mass. kitchen, fresh from the morning's Tai Chi classes.

"Bobby - you heard?"

"Yeah, I heard. Red Sox won."

With my Grandfather dead, it was Bobby I first pictured after I'd made sure Keith Foulke's final throw to first hadn't found the stands. All those collapses, complexes and curses could be retired.

Bobby hadn't watched. He had turned the team off long before I was born.

He and my grandfather helped me learn the game -- old school stuff, like how to use two hands when catching the ball, how to think before each pitch 'what would I do if the ball came to me,' how to climb back into the batter's box after a knock-down pitch. My heroes were classic Boston goats: Dick Stuart, Yaz, and later, Billy Buckner.

Cousin Bobby never shared my belief that this was the year for the Sox, no matter what year, no matter how good they looked. He'd given them up. Too much heartache. It's not like he turned into a Yankee fan. He just became agnostic.

"When did you stop rooting for them?" I asked after their first world championship in 86 years.

"Forty-nine," he said. "Raschi and Reynolds." Vic Raschi and Allie Reynolds were the two Yankee pitchers responsible for the Olde Towne Team losing their one-game lead to their hated rivals, an unbearable fold. That year Bobby unplugged for good.

I told him how I admired his restraint for not telling his young cousin that a life spent rooting for the Sox might be bad for the heart.

I asked how he knew they'd finally won, since he doesn't get the paper, or watch much tv. He'd been watching the weather report the next day when they cut to footage of the clubhouse celebration. He felt happy for the team, the town, the region. The same way he does when the town firehouse bell sounds, and he knows the schoolchildren have a snow day.

"It's a good distraction from Iraq," said Bobby, always a realist.

Rooting for the home team isn't always the right thing to do, he reminded me. "Sometimes the home team is your country, and they are not always right," he said. "Sometimes they fight the wrong wars."