Written by: Gloria Oliver (more books)
Category: Fantasy
Format: Trade Paperback or E-book, 228
Publisher: Zumaya Publications
(link)
ISBN: 978-1-934135-27-3
For as long as she can remember, La'tiera has known her purpose, her destiny. As the Bearer of the Eye, she will wait until the appointed time then sacrifice herself to the demons so the lands will be safe.
Yet as the time approaches, she is snatched from her home by strangers and is told it is for her protection. These strangers tell her she is not to be a sacrifice, but must fight to live in order for the world to be saved.
La'tiera will not be swayed, however, her duty clear. Despite their clever lies, she will follow through on her destiny and do what is required. Her every effort will be put to freeing herself from her kidnappers and meeting her fate as planned.
Teaser
La’tiera was left alone with the two men who’d kidnapped her. She rose to her feet, feeling tense, and stood near the wall. So she was quite startled when Rostocha dropped to one knee before her and bowed. Dal followed suit.
“Bearer, please allow me introduce myself. I am Rostocha of the fifth tier of Watchers, son of Lalu and Nathan.” He lifted his head, his eyes seeking her surprised ones. “I earnestly apologize for our methods, but they were necessary. We needed to make sure we could take you safely from your prison and could privately explain ourselves to you.”
He appeared earnest, but La’tiera didn’t believe him. “I don’t care to hear your explanations. I only want you to take me back where I belong.” She tried to make her expression hard, though in truth she quivered inside.
Rostocha looked away. “I’m sorry, but that is not possible. Our world is in peril and you are the key to our salvation. It is our duty to educate you, to keep you safe, until the time comes. Then after the danger is past, if you still wish to return, we will do as you ask.”
“What lies!” La’tiera felt a flash of anger bring heat to her face. “If you honestly wanted the world to be saved, you wouldn’t be making these promises to me.”
“La’tiera, what are you talking about?” Dal asked her.
She pierced him with a hard stare. “I could hardly choose to go back home once I was dead, could I?”
This brought Dal to his feet. “Dead? Why would you be dead?”
“Because it is required!”
Rostocha followed suit, a look of comprehension dawning on his face. “You believe you have to be a sacrifice.”
Dal spun to stare first at him then at her. “What? That’s insane!”
His utter shock at the fact confused her.
“You were expecting to die? You were going to allow yourself to be killed?”
She possessed no idea what to make of the horrified expression on his face. “Of course. I will do what is necessary, what I was chosen to do.”
Written by: Barbara Walters (more books)
Category: Biography & Autobiography - Personal Memoirs; Biog
Format: Hardcover, 624
Publisher: Knopf
(link)
ISBN: 978-0-307-26646-0
Excerpt from the Prologue Back in the sixties, when I was appearing daily on NBC’s Today show, I was living on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. My apartment was across from Carnegie Hall and on the corner of a very busy street. It was also near several large hotels that catered to businessmen. Perhaps because of this, the corner was the gathering place for some of the most attractive “ladies of the evening.” Each morning at five o’clock I would emerge from my building wearing dark glasses, as I hadn’t yet had my makeup done, and I was usually carrying a garment bag. It seemed obvious to the “ladies” that there was some big “number” I had just left. Now, bear in mind that, even then, I wasn’t exactly a spring chicken. But I would emerge and look at the young ladies, some of whom were still teenagers. “Good morning,” I would say. “Good morning,” they would answer. And then I would get into this long black limousine with its uniformed driver, and we would glide off into the early morning light. And you know what effect all this had on the ladies?
Written by: Michael Ondaatje (more books)
Category: Fiction - Literary; Fiction
Format: Hardcover, 288
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
(link)
ISBN: 978-0-7710-6872-0
By our grandfather’s cabin, on the high ridge, opposite a slope of buckeye trees, Claire sits on her horse, wrapped in a thick blanket. She has camped all night and lit a fire in the hearth of that small structure our ancestor built more than a generation ago, and which he lived in like a hermit or some creature, when he first came to this country. He was a self-sufficient bachelor who eventually owned all the land he looked down onto. He married lackadaisically when he was forty, had one son, and left him this farm along the Petaluma road.
Claire moves slowly on the ridge above the two valleys full of morning mist. The coast is to her left. On her right is the journey to Sacramento and the delta towns such as Rio Vista with its populations left over from the Gold Rush.
She persuades the horse down through the whiteness alongside crowded trees. She has been smelling smoke for the last twenty minutes, and, on the outskirts of Glen Ellen, she sees the town bar on fire–the local arsonist has struck early, when certain it would be empty. She watches from a distance without dismounting. The horse, Territorial, seldom allows a remount; in this he can be fooled only once a day. The two of them, rider and animal, don’t fully trust each other, although the horse is my sister Claire’s closest ally. She will use every trick not in the book to stop his rearing and bucking. She carries plastic bags of water with her and leans forward and smashes them onto his neck so the animal believes it is his own blood and will calm for a minute. When Claire is on a horse she loses her limp and is in charge of the universe, a centaur. Someday she will meet and marry a centaur.
The fire takes an hour to burn down. The Glen Ellen Bar has always been the location of fights, and even now she can see scuffles starting up on the streets, perhaps to honour the landmark. She sidles the animal against the slippery red wood of a madrone bush and eats its berries, then rides down into the town, past the fire. Close by, as she passes, she can hear the last beams collapsing like a roll of thunder, and she steers the horse away from the sound.
On the way home she passes vineyards with their prehistoric-looking heat blowers that keep air moving so the vines don’t freeze. Ten years earlier, in her youth, smudge pots burned all night to keep the air warm.
Most mornings we used to come into the dark kitchen and silently cut thick slices of cheese for ourselves. My father drinks a cup of red wine. Then we walk to the barn. Coop is already there, raking the soiled straw, and soon we are milking the cows, our heads resting against their flanks. A father, his two eleven-year-old daughters, and Coop the hired hand, a few years older than us. No one has talked yet, there’s just been the noise of pails or gates swinging open.
Coop in those days spoke sparingly, in a low-pitched monologue to himself, as if language was uncertain. Essentially he was clarifying what he saw–the light in the barn, where to climb the approaching fence, which chicken to cordon off, capture, and tuck under his arm. Claire and I listened whenever we could. Coop was an open soul in those days. We realized his taciturn manner was not a wish for separateness but a tentativeness about words. He was adept in the physical world where he protected us. But in the world of language he was our student.
At that time, as sisters, we were mostly on our own. Our father had brought us up single-handed and was too busy to be conscious of intricacies. He was satisfied when we worked at our chores and easily belligerent when it became difficult to find us. Since the death of our mother it was Coop who listened to us complain and worry, and he allowed us the stage when he thought we wished for it. Our father gazed right through Coop. He was training him as a farmer and nothing else. What Coop read, however, were books about gold camps and gold mines in the California northeast, about those who had risked everything at a river bend on a left turn and so discovered a fortune. By the second half of the twentieth century he was, of course, a hundred years too late, but he knew there were still outcrops of gold, in rivers, under the bunch grass, or in the pine sierras.
*
Now and then our father embraced us as any father would. This happened only if you were able to catch him in that no-man’s-land between tiredness and sleep, when he seemed wayward to himself. I joined him on the old covered sofa, and I would lie like a slim dog in his arms, imitating his state of weariness–too much sun perhaps, or too hard a day’s work.
Claire would also be there sometimes, if she did not want to be left out, or if there was a storm. But I simply wished to have my face against his checkered shirt and pretend to be asleep. As if inhaling the flesh of an adult was a sin and also a glory, a right in any case. To do such a thing during daylight would have been unthinkable, he’d have pushed us aside. He was not a modern parent, he had been raised with a few male rules, and he no longer had a wife to qualify or compromise his beliefs. So you had to catch him in that twilight state, when he had ceded control on the tartan sofa, his girls enclosed, one in each of his arms. I would watch the flicker under his eyelid, the tremble within that covering skin that signalled his tiredness, as if he were being tugged in mid-river by a rope to some other place. And then I too would sleep, descending into the layer that was closest to him. A father who allows you that should protect you all of your days, I think.
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Excerpt From: Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom
Written by: Christiane Northrup, M.D (more books)
Category: Health & Fitness - Women's Health
Format: Trade Paperback, 944
Publisher: Bantam
(link)
ISBN: 978-0-553-38410-9
Speaking Our Truth
During the month after this book was initially published, I had a series of nightmares that someone was in my bedroom about to kill me. For five consecutive nights I woke up screaming in terror, scaring my children as well as myself. My dreams were my not-so-subtle inner guidance system letting me know how terrified a part of me was to actually put what I knew out into the world. I was shocked by the power of this fear. Though I'd known intellectually that many women have a wall of fear within them that arises when they dare to speak their truth, I hadn't realized how much of that fear I also shared. I dreaded going to the hospital for the regular OB/GYN meeting in June 1994, after the book went on sale, because I was sure that my colleagues would reject me and my work. Until then I had lived a professional double life: One part of me told patients what I really believe, in the privacy of my personal office, and the other part, the "official" me, held back a bit (or a lot) in the hospital or around many colleagues.
My socialization as a doctor had taught me well what was acceptable to my colleagues and the hospital staff. I'd been treading a fine line for years. In fact, back in 1980, right after the birth of my first child and before I took my oral exams for board certification in OB/GYN, I was featured in a cover story on holistic women's health for East West Journal (now Natural Health). In order to ensure that nobody at the hospital where I worked saw the article, I went to the co-op where East West was sold locally and personally purchased all the copies there. No one at my hospital ever saw it—or if anyone did, they never said anything about it. But in 1994, it was not going to be possible to purchase every copy of a mass-marketed book! I had to face the music and bring the two parts of myself together publicly—and in front of conventional medical groups—for the first time.
My first step was to go to my weekly hospital meeting. When I walked in, I was relieved when almost no one said anything about the book and I wasn't treated any differently. It was as though nothing had happened. I had to laugh, for at that moment I learned a lesson about self-centeredness—believing that everyone around me is interested in what I'm doing or saying, when in fact they have their own lives to live. My biggest lesson was that my fear was just that . . . all mine, and it was time to let it go. This has been a gradual process: On the book's first anniversary, I had a series of dreams in which someone was videotaping me naked. I was still feeling vulnerable, but at least I wasn't about to be killed! Since then, the dreams have gradually disappeared.
Since 1994, I've been invited to speak to hospital staffs and doctors all over the country and abroad, and I have received an overwhelmingly positive and heartwarming response from women and men in the United States and around the world. Clearly, the world is ready for women's wisdom. The comment I hear most often, from women, men, and even many doctors, goes something like this: "Somewhere deep within me, I've always known the truth of what you were saying . . . but I didn't have words for it. And I certainly had never heard a doctor say it."
I have come to see that medical science, when combined with the wisdom of our hearts and our minds, is powerful medicine indeed. And that's why, almost as soon as this book was published, I found myself itching to revise it. Though there is no replacement for developing and honing our intuitive women's wisdom—that inner guidance that helps us choose which roads to take and which ones to avoid—I've found that this inner guidance works best when it's balanced with good, solid, up-to-date information.
And though the principles of true wisdom don't change much over time, useful and practical information does. We need both—just as we need both our left and right brain hemispheres. And with the burgeoning acceptance of alternative medicine into mainstream culture (a phenomenon that still surprises and delights me), more and more scientifically documented natural solutions to women's health problems become available every day. Simultaneously, good technological solutions, such as new devices to help stress urinary incontinence, as well as better surgical techniques to remove fibroids, are also helping many women. And each time I have updated my thinking and my recommendations, I have wanted to get that new information out to my readers so that they too can use it to improve their lives and their health.
In addition to adding better and more timely solutions to each section of the book, I found it necessary to completely rewrite the chapters on nutrition and menopause because there is so much new and helpful information in these areas, ranging from how to individualize a hormone replacement regimen using hormones native to the female body to how to find a dietary approach that balances both your brain and body biochemistry. Women's health is finally getting the attention it deserves, and as a longtime player in this field, I have a great deal to say and a lot of new information to share.
By sheer serendipity, my newsletter, Health Wisdom for Women, was launched in partnership with Phillips Publishing International several months after the first edition of this book came out. So now, instead of addressing the problems of twenty women in my office each day, I am able to reach thousands every month. In essence, the health care solutions offered through the newsletter, together with my subscribers' correspondence and feedback, have become a virtual practice. This has allowed me to keep my finger on the pulse of women's health care in a much broader and more diverse way than ever before. I've also heard from countless physician colleagues, who tell me that patients often bring in either a copy of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom or the newsletter to discuss a particular approach that I've recommended. Most of these doctors are grateful for the information. This grassroots approach truly appeals to my small-town origins.
Writing the first edition of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom opened up to me a larger world of women's wisdom that is growing all over the planet. Because of this, I have more support from more people and places than I ever dreamed possible. This has allowed me to become more of who I really am. I know from all the letters I receive that the same thing is happening to others across the globe. The original book is being used as a text in nursing schools and hospitals around the country—and this helps women's wisdom gather steam and momentum.
I've learned the power of telling my personal truth. It has been a very significant part of my healing process. And I have emerged feeling stronger and freer than ever before. I hope this book will inspire other women to speak their personal truths, too. I know that as each of us does this, the world—and our health—changes for the better.
Chapter twelve: Pregnancy and Birthing
My Personal Story
As a mother and a women's doctor, I have experienced childbirth from both sides of the bed. Every mother has moments that she cherishes from the birth experience and insights and feelings she'd like to share with other women. I'd like to tell you my story and also some remarkable stories of other women.
The due date for my first child was December 7, 1980. I continued my work supervising the residency clinic at a Boston hospital, and I flew or drove to Maine every other week to keep my practice going there. I had watched far too many pregnant women stop work early and then mope around the house eating, waiting for the baby to come, sometimes begging their obstetrician to induce labor. I didn't want to fall into that category. I had also seen dozens of women go overdue. I certainly wasn't going to get excited about labor—at least, not until my due date.
On Thanksgiving we went to dinner at a friend's house. Later that evening, back home in bed, I started to experience very mild but regular contractions that didn't hurt. Like the good controlled doctor that I was, I went into the bathroom and decided to examine my cervix to see if I was dilating. When I did this, my water broke. I thought, "Damn, now I know this really is it." Shortly thereafter, without the natural "padding" that the amniotic fluid provides, my contractions began coming every two minutes and were much more uncomfortable than initially.
I called my mother, who was planning to help me after the birth and said, "I'm not going to like this." She said that she understood (after six children, she knew) but that it wouldn't last forever. In the 1940s, Mom had always had to labor alone, strapped down in bed with no pain relief or personal support. For each delivery, she had been knocked unconscious by drugs and was handed the baby later by the obstetrician, as though it were a gift from him and not the fruit of her own labor. Thousands of women like her were never given a choice and didn't even know there were other ways to deliver.
The pain of labor was far greater than I thought it would be. (It's always worse after the membranes are ruptured, a point that doesn't seem to stop some obstetricians from doing it prematurely even when there's no need to.) I had seen hundreds of women in labor after five years of OB training. I had always focused on the women who didn't appear to have any discomfort, and I was so sure I would be one of them. But here I was—stuck. I felt as though I were in a box, and there was no way out except through. My intellect could not get me out of this—and I was determined to go through the process naturally. I already trusted the natural world more than the artificial man-made one. What I didn't appreciate then was the depth of my own programming into and cooperation with that same man-made world.
We called my obstetrician, a sensitive man with whom I had worked in the hospital for several years. He suggested that my husband and I go into the hospital. The only problem was that all I wanted to do was stay on the floor on my hands and knees. Moving anywhere seemed to me the most unnatural thing I could think of. It went against every instinct in my body.
I didn't have a bag packed for the hospital, so my husband ran around and put some underwear, a nightgown, and a toothbrush in a bag. Then he tried to get me dressed, out the door, and into the car. He nearly had to carry me. Left to my own instincts, I would never have left my position on my hands and knees on the floor.
When we got to the hospital, a place where I had worked for half a decade, I had to go through the admitting office as a patient. Admissions had lost the correct papers and would not let me go upstairs to the labor and delivery floor, where my nurse friends and my doctor were waiting. This was my introduction to the bureaucracy of hospitals, something I'd been shielded from for years. (Laboring in a hospital hallway alone is inhumane; but for thousands of women, it is their experience.) I simply walked out of that room, went to the back hall elevator, got in, and went up to labor and delivery by myself.
When my doctor examined me, I was four centimeters dilated. (You have to get to ten to be ready to push.) For the next three hours my contractions came frequently. But I failed to dilate beyond six centimeters, where I remained "stuck" for those three hours. The contraction pattern on the monitor was "dysfunctional." Though the contractions hurt a lot, and I never got much of a break between them, they simply were not getting the job done. I had what is known as hypertonic uterine inertia, which means that the contractions, though present, are not efficient—they are erratic, originating all over the uterus at the same time, like the heart when it goes into atrial fibrillation. (The high heart—in the chest—does the same sort of thing as the low heart—the uterus in the pelvis—sometimes.) Instead of beginning at the top and moving in a wave to the bottom of the uterus, the contractions originated in many places at the same time. Labor didn't progress well. It was like trying to get toothpaste out of a tube by squeezing it in fifteen places at the same time with a little bit of pressure, instead of squeezing firmly only at the back end of the tube so that the paste comes out uniformly.
When my doctor told me that I had made no progress in three hours, I knew what was next. (Remember, my intellect thought it was in control of my labor.) "Okay," I said, "start the IV, plug in the fetal electrode, and hang the Pit." Pitocin (oxytocin) is a drug that artificially contracts the uterus. After the Pitocin was started, the contractions became almost unbearable, going to full intensity almost as soon as they started.
No amount of Lamaze breathing distracted me from the intensity of the feeling that the lower part of my body was in the grip of a vise. At one point, I looked at the clock and saw that it was 11:15 A.M. What I recall thinking was, "If this goes on for another fifteen minutes, I'm going to need an epidural anesthetic." I didn't know that I was in transition—the part of labor that is most intense, just before the cervix becomes fully dilated. Within the next twelve minutes I suddenly felt the urge to push. It was the most powerful bodily sensation I've ever felt, and I was powerless to resist it. The thought flashed through my mind, "If I ever tell another woman not to push when every fiber in her body tells her to push, may God strike me with lightning!"
In two pushes, Ann almost flew out of my body. My obstetrician quite literally caught her. Though I was laboring in the "birthing room," I wasn't laboring in the "correct" delivery bed, and I barely made it to the delivery bed in time. (Birthing rooms now are equipped with beds that adjust for delivery of the baby, so that moving from one bed to another isn't necessary.)
Ann cried and cried, and though I put her to my breast almost immediately, it still took quite a while to calm her down. I believe this was because the Pitocin made for a far too rapid second stage of labor. It was too intense both for Ann and for me. Neither she nor I had much chance to recover between contractions.
A primiparous patient—one having her first baby—usually takes an hour or more to push the baby out. From the time the cervix is fully dilated to delivery—the second stage of labor—I went from six centimeters to delivery in less than one hour; my uterus was being pushed by a powerful drug, a very intense and distinctly unnatural experience.
To this day, my daughter is not particularly "at home" in her body and is afraid to take physical risks, for instance in skiing or hiking. Though there are various reasons for this, I know deep within me that being propelled into the world with so little time to accommodate herself to the process of labor was a terrifying experience for her.
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Excerpt From: Cork Boat
Written by: John Pollack (more books)
Category: Biography & Autobiography - Personal Memoirs
Format: Trade Paperback, 304
Publisher: Anchor
(link)
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3490-1
A Boy and a Boat
My first boat sank. I was six years old and had hammered it together from old orange crates and split firewood, sealing the cracks with bumper stickers from an Ann Arbor City Council candidate named Ulrich Stoll. When it was finished, I walked around the neighborhood and invited people to the launch. Saturday morning, at the pond.
On the big day, my family, a few neighbors, and one or two of their dogs dutifully assembled at the small, reedy marsh at the end of our block. As my mom cinched on my life jacket, my dad set the boat in the water. More excited than nervous, I stepped aboard.
It was a short voyage—straight down. Within seconds, brown water started gurgling up around my ankles, then gushing over the sides. Before I could even think about abandoning ship, it was all over. There I stood, knee-deep in water, my boat stuck fast on the muddy bottom.
Afterward, I wheeled the boat home on my wagon and junked it behind our garage. But I wasn’t discouraged. I was happy—I had built a real boat! And I was already thinking about my next one. I would just have to build it out of something guaranteed to float, no matter what.
I eventually settled on wine corks, the kind my parents pulled out of the bottle at the dinner table once or twice a week. Since it was impossible to sink a cork, I reasoned, it would be even more impossible to sink a lot of corks.
And so I started saving them, one by one.
From then on, all my parents’ corks went into a wooden bowl on the kitchen counter. To them, whether or not I could ever save enough corks was irrelevant. In our family, imagination itself was a prime virtue, and they encouraged my older sister, Sara, and me to let ours run free. In a home governed largely by expectations, not rules, I can remember only one explicit mandate from my mom: we weren’t allowed to get bored. Sara and I—separated by only a year and a half—were united by that challenge, and we constantly conspired to keep things interesting.
My parents set a good example. My mom was always busy in those early years, teaching dance and running local political campaigns. Apart from the surplus bumper stickers we often got as a result, Sara and I also learned that hard-fought battles, even losing ones, were worth the effort. In 1972, the two of us organized a dozen neighborhood kids to hold a bake sale for George McGovern, pulling an assortment of cupcakes and cookies from house to house on our wagons. I recall hauling them up one especially steep driveway, a veritable Everest, and ringing the doorbell at its summit. I can still see the owner, in a dark blue dress and towering bouffant, answering our pitch with a friendly but firm “I’m sorry. We’re for Mr. Nixon.”
My dad was a popular professor of geophysics at the University of Michigan, where he still teaches today. Always eager to travel the world, he saw no need to choose between family and fieldwork. So wherever he went, we went, too, whether it meant flying into the Amazon on a rattletrap Cessna, ply- ing the waters of Lake Titicaca in a traditional reed boat, or jouncing down some of the worst roads in Africa in a mud-spattered Land Rover.
If our family travels weren’t always comfortable or easy, they were never dull. In Zambia, we once picked up a tall hitchhiker in a red jumpsuit who carried a nine-foot spear. He smelled terrible, and Sara and I, sharing the backseat with him, secretly held our breath for as long as possible. Another time, when we were camping on an uninhabited island in Africa’s Lake Tanganyika, Sara spotted a cobra slithering toward our open tent. Within seconds, my mom grabbed a nearby shovel and, swinging it like a machete, chopped off the snake’s head.
Later that same year, as we were crossing the Zambezi River from Zambia to Botswana on a small, jerry-rigged ferry, a patrol boat from Rhodesia roared up the river and began circling us like a shark, trying to swamp the ferry’s outboard and send us drifting downstream into Rhodesian territory. Much to my dad’s dismay, my mom gave the soldiers a defiant, international gesture for “kiss my ass.” But we made it across safely. Sara and I assumed all of this was quite normal.
Back home in Ann Arbor, we traveled just as widely in our minds, reading book after book about explorers, pioneers, and inventors who helped make history and change the world. In our basement, Sara and I transformed an old refrigerator box into a spaceship, where we spent many happy hours exploring strange planets in faraway galaxies. I even sacrificed a few corks—the kind with plastic tops—for the cause. Inserted through the cardboard walls of our spacecraft, they made excellent knobs for adjusting the booster rockets.
When I was eleven, we moved to England for a year, for one of my dad’s sabbaticals. We lived in Durham, a small north- ern cathedral town, in a four-hundred-year-old gatekeeper’s cottage overlooking the River Wear. Every morning, Sara and I would put on our school uniforms and trudge off to the Durham Johnston Grammar Technical School, a gray, Dickensian institution where teachers—or “masters,” as they were called—required us to stand at attention whenever they entered the room, and complete our lessons with fountain pens.
But if the stern traditionalists at Durham Johnston were inclined to view Sara and me as wayward, latter-day colonials, we took it upon ourselves to excel to such a degree that there would be little doubt that the “Yanks,” as we were known, had not only won the Revolution but were first in their class, too.
And then, in a few horrible moments, my whole life changed. Leaving England, we took a family trip to India. After sharing a fun week aboard a houseboat on a gorgeous lake in Kashmir, my parents hired guides to take us all pony-trekking up into the Himalayas. Crossing a swollen river, Sara’s pony slipped on a rock and threw her into the rushing waters. My dad and two of our guides sprinted in to save her, but the thundering rapids and boulders overwhelmed them. Sara, along with one of the men who tried to save her, hit the rocks and was swept away. We searched the river for two days as we hiked out, but never found them. She was fourteen.
I was devastated beyond comprehension. Sara had been my best friend, and in a single, terrible fluke—just a few yards from safety—she had been taken from me forever. Gone were the games, the laughter, the mischievous conspiracies of our childhood. And gone were any illusions that the world was safe, that parents were all-powerful, or that life was fun. I might still have been a kid, but my childhood was over.
Already a close family, we pulled together even more. Still, the years of adolescence that followed were an exercise in abject misery, and I struggled through by channeling my grief into a frenetic schedule of study, sports, and music lessons. One of the few bright spots in junior high was building a raft with my best friend, Andrew, out of 126 cardboard milk cartons and several rolls of duct tape.
About ten feet long, the boat featured a sweeping prow that resembled a Viking ship, complete with a dragon’s head whose pointed horns were half-pint cartons, emptied of their half-and-half. We called our vessel the SS Milky Way, and launched it in the Huron River to a smattering of applause from friends and family. It floated beautifully, and we gave rides all afternoon before bringing it back to Andrew’s house. Unfortunately, only a day or so later, our craft began assuming the look and the smell of blue cheese. Only reluctantly, and at the strong insistence of Andrew’s dad, did we haul it to the curb for the garbage man.
Some years later, after high school, I took a summer job as a hotel groundskeeper on Mackinac Island, a small, historic resort island in Michigan’s Straits of Mackinac, at the confluence of Lakes Michigan and Huron. I had first visited the island in third grade, and was fascinated by its old colonial fort and the fact that it banned cars altogether. If you wanted to get around on Mackinac you either walked, rode your bicycle, or climbed aboard a horse-drawn wagon. More than anything, I loved all the boats that jammed its harbor, and went there hoping to spend time on the water.
Seeing I was young and fit, the head groundskeeper assigned me the task of moving rocks, work that made the prospect of two months on Mackinac seem more like a sentence on Alcatraz. After two days at hard labor, I hatched a plan. I had brought along my violin, and convinced the resort’s owner to give me a tryout as a violinist in his restaurant. “I’ve played the violin since I was four,” I said, concealing my nervous- ness. “I can do more for you making music than I can moving rocks.”
Something of a wheeler-dealer himself, he admired my chutzpah; he also liked the idea of replacing his maître d’s George Winston tapes with some live entertainment. So, for the next few days, I moved rocks by day and played violin by night. Then, when I complained that my hands could only manage one or the other, the owner shifted me to musical work altogether, and I traded my grubby jeans for a black suit, bow tie, and the easy life of a solo, strolling violinist.
The head groundskeeper grumbled at my escape from his rock pile, but I didn’t care. My quarry had now become all those romantic couples who tipped so generously for a few songs at tableside.
When I was done for the night, I’d walk home and pull the crumpled bills from my pockets—along with that night’s haul of corks. Not that I had plans to build the boat of my dreams anytime soon, but saving those corks reminded me, somehow, of happier times. By summer’s end when I shipped off the island, I had several hundred.
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Excerpt From: French Women Don't Get Fat
Written by: Mireille Guiliano (more books)
Category: Health and Fitness-Diets
Format: Paperback, 368
Publisher: Vintage
(link)
ISBN: 978-0-307-38799-8
hapter 1
VIVE L’AMÉRIQUE:
THE BEGINNING . . . I AM OVERWEIGHT
I love my adopted homeland. But first, as an exchange student in Massachusetts, I learned to love chocolate-chip cookies and brownies. And I gained twenty pounds.
My love affair with America had begun with my love of the English language; we met at the lycée (junior high and high school) when I turned eleven. English was my favorite class after French literature, and I simply adored my English teacher. He had never been abroad but spoke English without a French accent or even a British one. He had learned it during World War II, when he found himself in a POW camp with a high school teacher from Weston, Massachusetts (I suspect they had long hours to practice). Without knowing whether they’d make it out alive, they decided that if they did, they would start an exchange program for high school seniors. Each year, one student from the United States would come to our town and one of us would go to Weston. The exchange continues to this day, and the competition is keen.
During my last year at the lycée, I had good enough grades to apply, but I wasn’t interested. With dreams of becoming an English teacher or professor, I was eager to start undergraduate studies at the local university. And at eighteen, naturally I had also convinced myself I was madly in love with a boy in my town. He was the handsomest though admittedly not the brightest boy around, the coqueluche (the darling) of all the girls. I couldn’t dream of parting from him, so I didn’t even think of applying for Weston. But in the schoolyard, between classes, there was hardly another topic of conversation. Among my friends, the odds-on favorite to go was Monique; she wanted it so badly, and besides, she was the best in our class, a fact not lost on the selection committee, which was chaired by my English teacher and included among its distinguished ranks PTA members, other teachers, the mayor, and the local Catholic priest, balanced by the Protestant minister. But on the Monday morning when the announcement was expected, the only thing announced was that no decision had been made.
At home that Thursday morning (those days, there was no school on Thursdays but half days on Saturday), my English teacher appeared at the door. He had come to see my mother, which seemed rather strange, considering my good grades. As soon as he left, with a big, satisfied smile but not a word to me except hello, my mother called me. Something was très important.
The selection committee had not found a suitable candidate. When I asked about Monique, my mother tried to explain something not easily fathomed at my age: My friend had everything going for her, but her parents were Communists, and that would not fly in America. The committee had debated at great length (it was a small town, where everybody was fully informed about everybody else), but they could not escape concluding that a daughter of Communists could never represent France!
My teacher had proposed me as an alternative, and the other members had agreed. But since I had not even applied, he had to come and persuade my parents to let me go. My overadoring father, who would never have condoned my running away for a year, was not home. Perhaps my teacher was counting on this fact; but in any event, he managed to sell the idea to my mother. The real work then fell to her, because she had to persuade not only my father, but me as well. Not that she was without her own misgivings about seeing me go, but Mamie was always wise and farsighted; and she usually got her way. I was terribly anxious about what Monique would say, but once word got out, she was first to declare what a fine ambassador I would make. Apparently, Communist families were quite open and practical about such matters, and she had already been given to understand that family ideology had made her a dark horse from the start.
And so I went. It was a wonderful year—one of the best of my adolescence—and it certainly changed the course of my entire life. To a young French girl, Weston, a wealthy Boston suburb, seemed an American dream—green, manicured, spread out, with huge gorgeous homes and well-to-do, well-schooled families. There was tennis, horseback riding, swimming pools, golf, and two or three cars per family—a far, far cry from any town in eastern France, then or now. The time was so full of new, unimagined things, but finally too rich, and I don’t mean demographically. For all the priceless new friends and experiences I was embracing, something else altogether, something sinister, was slowly taking shape. Almost before I could notice, it had turned into fifteen pounds, more or less . . . and quite probably more. It was August, my last month before the return voyage to France. I was in Nantucket with one of my adoptive families when I suffered the first blow: I caught a reflection of myself in a bathing suit. My American mother, who had perhaps been through something like this before with another daughter, instinctively registered my distress. A good seamstress, she bought a bolt of the most lovely linen and made me a summer shift. It seemed to solve the problem but really only bought me a little time.
In my final American weeks, I had become very sad at the thought of leaving all my new pals and relations, but I was also quite apprehensive of what my French friends and family would say at the sight of the new me. I had never mentioned the weight gain in letters and somehow managed to send photos showing me only from the waist up.
The moment of truth was approaching.
2
LA FILLE PRODIGUE:
RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER
My father brought my brother with him to Le Havre to collect me. I was traveling on the SS Rotterdam. The ocean liner was still the transatlantic standard preferred by many French people in the late 1960s. With me was the new American exchange student from Weston, who would be spending the year in our town.
Since he had not seen me for a whole year, I expected my father, who always wore his heart on his face, would embarrass me, bounding up the gangway for the first hug and kiss. But when I spied the diminutive French man in his familiar beret—yes, a beret—he looked stunned. As I approached, now a little hesitantly, he just stared at me, and as we came near, after a few seconds that seemed endless, there in front of my brother and my American shipmate, all he could manage to say to his cherished little girl come home was, “Tu ressembles à un sac de patates” (“You look like a sack of potatoes”). Some things don’t sound any prettier in French. I knew what he had in mind: not a market-size sack, but one of the big, 150-pound burlap affairs that are delivered to grocery stores and restaurants! Fortunately the girl from Weston spoke little French, else she would have had a troubling first impression of French family life.
At age nineteen, I could not have imagined anything more hurtful, and to this day the sting has not been topped. But my father was not being mean. True, tact was never his strength; and the teenage girl’s hypersensitivity about weight and looks wasn’t yet the proverbial pothole every parent today knows to steer around. The devastating welcome sprang more than anything from his having been caught off guard. Still, it was more than I could take. I was at once sad, furious, vexed, and helpless. At the time, I could not even measure the impact.
On our way home to eastern France, we stopped in Paris for a few days, just to show my friend from Weston the City of Light, but my inexorable grumpiness made everyone eager to hit the road again. I ruined Paris for all of us. I was a mess.
The coming months were bitter and awkward. I didn’t want anyone to see me, but everyone wanted to greet l’Américaine. My mother understood right away not only how and why I had gained the weight, but also how I felt. She treaded lightly, avoiding the unavoidable topic, perhaps particularly because I had soon given her something more dire to worry about.
Having seen a bit of the world, I had lost my taste for attending the local university. I now wanted to study languages in a Grande École (like an Ivy League school) in Paris and, on top of that, to take a literary track at the Sorbonne at the same time. It was unusual and really an insane workload. My parents were not at all keen on the idea of Paris: if I got in (hardly a given, as the competition is legendary), it was going to be a big emotional and financial sacrifice to have me three and a half hours from home. So I had to campaign hard, but thanks in part to the obvious persistence of my raw nerves, in the end they let me go back to Paris for the famously grueling entrance exam. I passed, and in late September I moved to Paris. My parents always wanted the best for me.
By All Saints’ Day (November 1), I had gained another five pounds, and by Christmas, five more still. At five feet three, I was now overweight by any standard, and nothing I owned fit, not even my American mother’s summer shift. I had two flannel ones—same design, but roomier—made to cover up my lumpiness. I told the dressmaker to hurry and hated myself every minute of the day. More and more, my father’s faux pas at Le Havre seemed justified. Those were blurry days of crying myself to sleep and zipping past all mirrors. It may not seem so strange an experience for a nineteen-year-old, but none of my French girlfriends was going through it.
Then something of a Yuletide miracle occurred. Or perhaps I should say, Dr. Miracle, who showed up thanks to my mamie. Over the long holiday break, she asked the family physician, Dr. Meyer, to pay a call. She did this most discreetly, careful not to bruise me further. Dr. Meyer had watched me grow up, and he was the kindest gentleman on earth. He assured me that getting back in shape would be really easy and just a matter of a few “old French tricks.” By Easter, he promised, I’d be almost back to my old self, and certainly by the end of the school year in June I’d be ready to wear my old bathing suit, the one I’d packed for America. As in a fairy tale, it was going to be our secret. (No use boring anyone else with the particulars of our plan, he said.) And the weight would go away much faster than it came. Sounded great to me. Of course, I wanted to put my faith in Dr. Meyer, and fortunately, there didn’t seem to be many options at the time.
DR. MIRACLE’S WEEKEND PRESCRIPTION
For the next three weeks, I was to keep a diary of everything I ate. This is a strategy that will sound familiar from some American diet programs, such as Weight Watchers. I was to record not only what and how much, but also when and where. There was no calorie counting, not that I could have done that. The stated purpose was simply for him to gauge the nutritional value of what I was eating (it was the first time I ever heard the word). Since nothing more was asked of me, I was only too happy to comply. This is the first thing you should do, too.
Dr. Meyer demanded no great precision in measurement. Just estimate, he said, stipulating “a portion” as the only unit of quantity and roughly equal to a medium-size apple. In America, where the greatest enemy of balanced eating is ever bigger portions, I suggest a little more precision. Here’s where the small kitchen scale comes in. (Bread, which sometimes comes in huge slices here, might be more easily weighed than compared with an apple, which seems bigger here, too!)
Three weeks later, I was home again for the weekend. Just before noon, Dr. Miracle, distingué, gray templed, made his second house call. He also stayed for lunch. Afterward, reviewing my diary, he immediately identified a pattern utterly obvious to him but hiding somehow from me, as I blithely recorded every crumb I put in my mouth. On the walk between school and the room I was renting in the Seventh Arrondissement, there were no fewer than sixteen pastry shops. Without my having much noticed, my meals were more and more revolving around pastry. As I was living in Paris, my family could not know this, so when I came home, my mother naturally prepared my favorites, unaware I was eating extra desserts on the sly, even under her roof.
My Parisian pastry gluttony was wonderfully diverse. In the morning there was croissant or pain au chocolat or chouquette or tarte au sucre. Lunch was preceded by a stop at Poîlane, the famous breadmaker’s shop, where I could not resist the pain aux raisins or tarte aux pommes (apple tart) or petits sablés. Next stop was at a café for the ubiquitous jambon-beurre (ham on a buttered baguette) and what remained of the Poîlane pastry with coffee. Dinner always included and sometimes simply was an éclair, Paris Brest, religieuse, or mille-feuille (curiously called a napoleon outside France), always some form of creamy, buttery sweetness. Sometimes I would even stop off for a palmier (a big puff pastry sugar-covered cookie) for my goûter (afternoon snack). As a student, I was living off things I could eat on the go. Hardly any greens were passing my lips, and my daily serving of fruit was coming from fruit tarts. I was eating this strangely lopsided fare without the slightest thought and with utter contentment—except, of course, for how I looked.
Now this was obviously not a diet I had picked up in America, where one could hardly say the streets are lined with irresistible patisseries (though then, as now, there was no shortage of tempting hot chocolate-chip cookie stands and sellers of rich ice cream, to say nothing of a mind-boggling variety of supermarket sweets made with things infinitely worse for you than cream and butter). But as I was to learn, it was my adoptive American way of eating that had gone to my head and opened me up to the dangers of this delicious Parisian minefield. For in America, I had gotten into some habits: eating standing up, not making my own food, living off whatever (n’importe quoi, as the French say), as other kids were doing. Brownies and bagels were particular hazards; we had nothing quite like them at home, so who could tell how rich they were?
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Picasso's visit to Rome in February 1917 had originally been conceived as a wedding trip, but at the last moment his on-again off-again mistress, Irène Lagut, who had promised to marry him, changed her mind, as her predecessor, Gaby Lespinasse, had done the year before. Instead of Irène, Jean Cocteau accompanied him. In a vain attempt to set himself at the head of the avant-garde, this ambitious young poet had inveigled Picasso into collaborating with him on Parade: a gimmicky, quasi-modernist ballet about the efforts of a couple of shills to lure the public into their vaudeville theater by tantalizing them with samples of their acts. Cocteau had desperately wanted Diaghilev to stage this ballet in Paris. The meddlesome Polish hostess Misia Sert had tried to scupper the project. However, Picasso's Chilean protector and patron, Eugenia Errázuriz, had persuaded Diaghilev to agree, provided Picasso did the décor, Erik Satie the score, and Léonide Massine the choreography. Sets, costumes, and rehearsals were to be done in Rome, where Diaghilev had his wartime headquarters. Picasso's cubist followers were horrified that their avant-garde hero should desert them for anything as frivolous and modish as the Ballets Russes, but he ignored their complaints. After two and a half years of war, with its appalling death toll, its hardships and shortages, and above all the absence of his closest friends—particularly Braque and Apollinaire at the front—Picasso was elated at the prospect of leaving the bombardments and blackouts behind to spend a couple of months in the relative peace of Rome, which he had always wanted to visit. Besides working on Parade, he was determined to get married.
Picasso and Cocteau arrived in Rome on February 19, 1917, a day later than they had intended. Cocteau, who had forgotten to get a visa from the Italian embassy, had lied when telling him that no reservations were available. Diaghilev had booked them into the Grand Hotel de Russie on the corner of the Via del Babuino and the Piazza del Popolo. So that Picasso could work in peace on the costumes and sets for Parade, he had also arranged for him to have one of the coveted Patrizi studios, tucked away in a sprawling, unkempt garden off the Via Margutta. Although most of the artists are now gone, the Patrizi studios are still as idyllic as they were in 1917.
"I cannot forget Picasso's studio in Rome," Cocteau later wrote. "A small chest contained the maquette for Parade, with its houses, trees and shack. It was there that Picasso did his designs for the Chinese Conjurer, the Managers, the American Girl, the Horse, which Anna de Noailles would compare to a laughing tree, and the Acrobats in blue tights, which would remind Marcel Proust of The Dioscuri."[1] From his window Picasso had a magnificent view of the sixteenth-century Villa Medici, seat of the French Academy, towering above the studio garden. As he well knew, the Academy had associations with some of his favorite artists. Velázquez had painted the garden; Ingres had spent four years there as a fellow at the outset of his career and, later, six years as director; Corot had also worked there and caught the golden light of Rome and the campagna, as no other painter had done.
"Rome seems made by [Corot]," Cocteau reported to his mother. "Picasso talks of nothing else but this master, who touches us much more than Italians hell bent on the grandiose!"[2] That Picasso infinitely preferred the informality of Corot's radiant views to the pomp and ceremony and baroque theatricality of so much Roman painting is confirmed by his sun-filled pointillistic watercolors of the Villa Medici's ochre façade—as original as anything he did in Rome.[3]
Diaghilev insisted that Picasso and Cocteau share his passion for the city. Sightseeing was compulsory that very first evening. Since there was no blackout as there was in Paris, they were able to see the Colosseum all lit up—"that enormous reservoir of the centuries," Cocteau said, "which one would like to see come alive, crowded with people and wild beasts and peanut vendors."[4] The following morning, Diaghilev picked them up in his car for another grand tour. In the evening he took them to the circus. "Sad but beautiful arena," Cocteau wrote his mother. "Misia Sert (or rather her double) performed on the tight rope. Diaghilev slept until woken with a start by an elephant putting its feet on his knees."[5]
When he arrived in Rome, Picasso was still suffering from chagrin d'amour. Eager to find a replacement for Irène Lagut, he had promptly fallen in love with one of Diaghilev's Russian dancers, the twenty-five-year-old Olga Khokhlova. Although he courted her assiduously and did a drawing of her, which he signed with his name in Cyrillic, Olga proved adamantly chaste. Chastity was a challenge that Picasso had seldom had to face. Both Diaghilev and Bakst warned him that a respectable Russian woman would not sacrifice her virginity unless assured of marriage. "Une russe on l'épouse," Diaghilev said. Olga personified this view. She was indeed respectable: the daughter of Stepan Vasilievich Khokhlov, who was not a general, as she claimed, but a colonel in the Corps of Engineers in charge of the railway system.[6] Olga had three brothers and a younger sister. They lived in St. Petersburg in a state-owned apartment on the Moika Canal. Around 1910, the colonel had been sent to the Kars region to oversee railroad construction, and the family had followed him there. Olga stayed behind. Egged on by a school friend's sister, Mathilda Konetskaya, who had joined the Diaghilev ballet after graduating from the Imperial Ballet School, she decided to become a dancer.
Olga had considerable talent. Despite starting late and studying briefly at a St. Petersburg ballet school,[7] she managed to get auditioned by Diaghilev. The Ballets Russes was having difficulty prying dancers loose from the state-run theaters and was desperate for recruits. A committee consisting of Nijinsky and the greatest of classical ballet masters, Enrico Cecchetti, as well as Diaghilev—a trio described by another dancer as more terrifying than any first- night audience—put Olga through her paces and accepted her. Intelligence and diligence compensated for lack of experience. Nijinsky was sufficiently impressed to pick her out of the corps de ballet.
Léonide Massine, who had taken Nijinsky's place in Diaghilev's company as well as in his heart, had chosen Olga to play the role of Dorotea in Les Femmes de bonne humeur, an adaptation of a comedy by the eighteenth-century playwright Goldoni, with sets by Léon Bakst and a heavily arranged score after Scarlatti. It was at a rehearsal for this ballet, which would have its premiere in Rome the following month, that Picasso spotted Olga and immediately set about courting her. To familiarize himself with the techniques of theatrical décor as well as watch his new love at work, he helped Carlo Socrate (the scene painter who would work on Parade) execute Bakst's scenery. So that he could join Olga backstage, Picasso even helped the stagehands at the ballet's premiere.[8] Eighteen months later he would marry her.
Compared to her predecessors—Bohemian models Picasso had lived with in Montmartre or Montparnasse—Olga was very much a lady, not, however, the noblewoman biographers have assumed her to be.[9] She came from much the same professional class as Picasso's family. Don José, Picasso's father, may have been a very unsuccessful painter, but his brothers included a diplomat, a revered prelate, and a successful doctor, who had married the daughter of a Malagueño marquis. One of Picasso's mother's first cousins was a general—more celebrated than Olga's parent, also the real thing. Indeed, it may have been Olga's lack of blue blood that made her so anxious to become a grande dame and bring up her son like a little prince. Arthur Rubinstein, the pianist, who had met Olga in 1916 when the ballet visited San Sebastián, remembered her as "a stupid Russian who liked to brag about her father, who she pretended was a colonel in the Tsar's own regiment. The other dancers assured me that he was only a sergeant."[10] This was an exaggeration, but Olga's pretensions were resented by other members of the company.
Ten years younger than Picasso, Olga had fine regular features, dark reddish hair, green eyes, a small, lithe, dancer's body, and a look of wistful, Slavic melancholy that accorded with the romanticism of classic Russian ballet. Formal photographs reveal Olga to have been a beauty—usually an unsmiling one—although in early snapshots of her with Picasso and Cocteau in Rome, she is actually grinning. Later, she plays up to him, dances for him, takes on different personalities, which might explain the widely varying reactions to her. The celebrated ballerina Alexandra Danilova declared that Olga "was nothing—nice but nothing. We couldn't discover what Picasso saw in her."[11] A Soviet ballet historian, the late Genya Smakov, found references to her in an unpublished memoir by someone working for Diaghilev, where she is said to have been "neurotic."[12] On the other hand, Lydia Lopokova—the most intelligent of Diaghilev's ballerinas—was Olga's best friend in the company.
Picasso fell for Olga's vulnerability. He sensed the victim within. She would have appealed to his possessiveness and protectiveness especially when the Russian Revolution cut her off from her family. Her vulnerability would likewise have appealed to Picasso's sadistic side. (The women in his life were expected to read the Marquis de Sade.) In the past year rejection by the two women he had hoped to marry had left him exceedingly vulnerable. Picasso's residual bourgeois streak should also be taken into account. He was thirty-five and wanted to settle down with a presentable wife and have a son. None of his father's three brothers had had any issue, and there was pressure from his mother to produce an heir.
Sexual abstinence was something Picasso had seldom if ever had to face. His two previous mistresses may have shied away from marrying him, but they had been easy enough to seduce. Olga was as unbeddable as the "nice" Malagueña girls that his family had tried to foist on him. "Don't forget Olga who cares for you very much," she wrote on the back of a dramatic photograph of herself in Firebird. "Who neglects me, loses me."[13] (Cocteau could not resist using the phrase qui me néglige me perd as a caption to a caricature of Bakst he subsequently sent to Olga.)[14] Picasso must have been very much in love to put up with this ukase. Ernest Ansermet, Diaghilev's principal conductor, describes walking back to the Hotel Minerva, where he and the dancers were staying. Olga had the room next to Ansermet's. "I heard Picasso in the passage knocking at her door and Olga on the other side of it saying 'No, no, Monsieur Picasso, I'm not going to let you in.' "[15] Clearly, marriage was his only option.
Diaghilev, who felt responsible for the genteel Russian girls in his company, advised Picasso against marrying Olga. Foreseeing problems with her parents, who were averse to their daughter marrying a mere painter, the impresario told Picasso that he had a much more suitable girl set aside for him. She was currently dancing in South America and would soon be returning to Europe. Picasso would not listen; he was obsessed by Olga. Not that this kept him away from the local brothels, to judge by an address noted down in his Roman sketchbook.[16] "In Rome of an evening," Picasso told Apollinaire, "whores ply their trade in automobiles—at walking pace—they accost their clients with smiles and gestures and stop the car to negotiate the price."[17] From Naples he would send Apollinaire a postcard: "In Naples all the women are beautiful. Everything is easy here,"[18] and, sure enough, the sketchbook he took with him records the address of a Neapolitan brothel. For an Andalusian, regular visits to a whorehouse would have been an obligatory response to a fiancée's virtuous stand. Another option was an affair with a less virtuous member of the company. Picasso did that too.[19]
Cut off by the war from Russia, Diaghilev and his company led a nomadic life. Their principal wartime base was Rome. Officially the impresario stayed in the Grand Hotel, but he spent most of his time in an apartment in the Marchese Theodoli's palazzo on the Corso that he had rented for Léonide Massine, the handsome twenty-one-year-old dancer, who had been his lover for the previous three years. So as not to compromise himself publicly, Massine had insisted that he and his employer live under separate roofs. That this hot-blooded heterosexual, who was also a cold-blooded operator, should have allowed himself to be captured and caged by the notoriously jealous and possessive Diaghilev is not surprising. In Russia it had been a standard career move for a dancer of either sex to have a rich, influential protector. To negotiate these arrangements, one of the company's dancers, Alexandrov, acted as pimp. Massine's predecessor in Diaghilev's life, the legendary Nijinsky, who was likewise heterosexual, had started off—with his mother's blessing—as the protégé of the rich, young Prince Lvov. The Prince had then handed him on to the Polish Count Tishkievitch, who gave him a piano.[20] Like Diaghilev's previous lover, Dimitri Filosofov, Nijinsky would leave the impresario for a woman; as would Massine.
Exceedingly parsimonious and very ambitious, Massine had everything to gain from this arrangement. Diaghilev had already turned him into a star dancer, a choreographer of near genius and a major collector of modern paintings, including many Picassos and Braques. Sex with Diaghilev was part of the job—"like going to bed with a nice fat old lady,"[21] as he told one of his mistresses, when she asked how he could possibly have done it with Diaghilev.
That Massine was a passionate Hispanophile would prove to be a great bond with Picasso. The previous summer in Madrid, the dancer had agreed to choreograph two ballets with Spanish themes, Las Meninas, which would be put on later in 1917, and Tricorne, which would not appear until 1919. A small, driven, Spanish-looking Russian with enormous eyes—in some respects a younger version of Picasso—Massine expected the artist to teach him about modern art. He proved so perceptive and imaginative and such a quick learner that over the next ten years he and Picasso would collaborate on four great ballets.
Another bond between Picasso and Massine was a passion for women—a passion that differentiated them from Diaghilev's largely homosexual entourage. Cocteau's presence in Rome made for more pique and intrigue than usual. In the face of Diaghilev's jealousy, Picasso was delighted to provide his fellow womanizer with an alibi for his amorous escapades. After failing to persuade Picasso to spy for him, Diaghilev hired a couple of detectives to take on this job.[22] At the slightest suspicion of infidelity on Massine's part, Diaghilev would have a temper tantrum, attack the furniture with his stick, tear the telephone out of the wall and smash it.
NOTES [1] Jean Cocteau, Oeuvres complètes, vol. IX (Lausanne: Marguerat, 1946-51), 246. [2] Letter from Cocteau to his mother, February 22, 1917, Cocteau 1989, 297. [3] Picasso sent one of these Villa Medici drawings to the dealer André Level, who wrote him on March 10, 1917 (Archives Picasso): "Merci du croquis de la villa Médicis, dont vous serez peut être un jour le Directeur." Level goes on to say "Revenez-nous avec un tableau de Romaines, frère de celui des Hollandaises, ou, simplement avec des souvenirs agréables." [4] Letter from Cocteau to his mother, February 20, 1917, Cocteau 1989, 296. [5] Letter from Cocteau to his mother, February 22, 1917, ibid., 297. After living with Sert since 1908, Misia was known as Madame Sert, although she was not married to him until 1920. [6] Cocteau refers to Olga in a letter to Picasso, April 13, 1917 (Archives Picasso) as "La fille du Général Kloklov." [7] The school was run by Yevgenia Pavlovna Sokolova. [8] Carandente 1998, 37. [9] Penrose presumably believed that Olga was a general's rather than a colonel's daughter; otherwise he would not have described her as such (Penrose, 201). In her typescript, "A tale of brief love and eternal hatred," Natalia Semenyova, the only Russian art historian to write about Olga, likewise mistakenly claimed she was a noblewoman. [10] Rubinstein 1980, 150. [11] Menaker-Rothschild, 49 n. 8. [12] Genya Smakov in conversation with the author. [13] Baldassari 1998, 96. [14] Letter from Cocteau to "Mademoiselle Olga Koclowa" [sic], April 21, 1917, Archives Picasso. [15] Ernest Anserment, Ecrits sur la musique (Neuchatel: Langages, 1971), 26. [16] MP Carnets I, cat. 19 (MP 1867). [17] Postcard from Picasso to Gaullame Apollinaire, February 1917, Caizergues and Seckel, 144. [18] Postcard from Picasso to Apollinaire, March 10, 1917, ibid., 145. [19] According to Laurence Madeline, former Conservateur, Archives Picasso. [20] Buckle 1971, 56-7. [21] Recounted to the author by Tatiana Lieberman. [22] Sokolova 1960, 170.
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When the Hiroshima Project was long over and all the dust had settled, Daisy discovered that she could close her eyes anywhere, in a crowded room or doing the dishes, and see the girl getting off the plane. She would always think of Keiko as “the girl,” though she had been eighteen when she came to stay, old enough to be called a woman. The press seized upon the name Hiroshima Maiden – such an odd way to describe an A-bomb survivor: as though Keiko might have stepped out of an Arthurian legend, wearing a cone-shaped princess hat; as though being ravaged by the bomb might have transformed the girl, giving her, along with a history of suffering, some fairy-tale virtues. Purity perhaps. Or maidenly goodness.
Daisy Lawrence had stood in a small roped-off area on the tarmac of Mitchell Air Force Base, waiting for the airplane to land. Irene Day, one of the Hiroshima Project’s principal organizers, stood beside her. The rain was stiff that day–stinging pellets that flew at them sideways out of the gauzy marsh east of the air base. A few feet away a dozen journalists huddled in a grey group, hats pulled low.
Irene Day had dressed appropriately – she always did – in a mannish little fedora and matching kid gloves. She was the sort of woman, Daisy thought, who would choose the right outfit for a hurricane. Next to her Daisy felt dowdy – blond hair frizzing in the wet, feet aching in tight patent-leather pumps.
Of course she knew better than to be thinking about her shoes at a time like this. This was an important moment in history, this chill March day of 1952: she was about to greet a Hiroshima survivor, the first ever to set foot on American soil. Daisy pulled in her stomach, already held tightly in place by her girdle, and did her best to adopt a look of calm expectancy. She moved closer to a freckle-faced young photographer, so that his broad back blocked the rain, which seemed to come from all directions now – stinging her chin and cheeks and the backs of her knees.
At last the gleaming plane hove into view above their heads. It headed out to sea, then banked and came in low, bouncing at the end of the runway, rising like a bird, landing, hissing, skipping. It hung poised for several seconds on one wheel before righting itself with a bump and coming to a stop, emitting black exhaust in a rather alarming fashion. For what seemed an inordinately long time the airplane engine thudded and the propellers churned and thumped. But at last the propellers stilled, the plane gave a final shudder and several air force cadets rolled the steel stairs into place.
The airplane door, massive and unyielding, seemed to need some battering knocks from the inside before it swung open. The pilot, a wing commander in a navy uniform complete with epaulettes, stepped jauntily down the steps, shook hands with the cadets, then walked across the runway. He was followed by two stewards and twenty tanned, robust soldiers – the plane seemed endlessly to disgorge them – men returning from military duty in Hawaii, where the plane had touched down for refuelling.
Then at last Keiko stepped onto the platform. She lifted one gloved hand to straighten her hat. How strangely it glowed in the overcast air, whiter than white. Even from this distance Daisy could see the mottled rhubarb stain on her cheek. The famous atomic scar. She tottered on the platform, looking as though the hard rain might blow her away. The purse Keiko clasped–Daisy learned later–had been picked up in a Honolulu gift shop. It was encrusted with tiny iridescent nautiluses.
Daisy felt an urge to say something to mark the magnitude of the occasion. She turned to Irene, but she was already up ahead, arguing with one of the cadets guarding the gate. He clicked the metal latch with his thumb in an irritating manner, then shook his head severely.
“But I’m the chief organizer of this project,” Irene was saying. She wasn’t, but how was the cadet to know? He shrugged. Irene raised her hand, as though intending to knock the boy’s cap off. “Let me by,” she hissed, but all at once the freckle-faced photographer, the one whose broad back had sheltered Daisy from the rain, strode forward and leapt the rope. The cadet cried out for him to stop, but the photographer had an agenda of his own: he dashed towards the plane, leaping puddles, soaking his trouser legs, letting his hat blow off, not even turning to see it roll wildly away. And now the rest of them followed suit, and Irene and Daisy were picked up and blown, or so it felt, over the trampled rope and across the runway. They were no longer the official welcoming delegation, not by a long shot: they were part of a mob.
That was Keiko Kitigawa’s welcome to America.
The girl turned towards the advancing stampede. With one hand she groped behind her for the banister. The other hand she held up, fingers spread in an ineffectual fan, attempting to shield her face, with its bubbled scar, from the repeated flash of the cameras.
2.
Imagine a girl to whom you can attach any stereotype.
Imagine her stepping off a plane, holding up a hand to keep her prim round hat in place.
Imagine her as inscrutable.
Imagine her as incomparably damaged.
Imagine her as carrying the seeds of something entirely new – radioactive seeds – lodged in her bones, skin, hair.
Imagine her as the first of her kind to come to America: children of the atomic bomb. Children who are asked, repeatedly, in letters that arrive each spring, to donate their bodies to science, so that when they die – six years later, or forty – their hearts can be examined, their cells studied, their kidneys filled with turquoise dye, placed in a Petri dish.
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Excerpt From: Gemini Summer
Written by: Iain Lawrence (more books)
Category: Juvenile Fiction - Family - Siblings
Format: Hardcover, 272
Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers
(link)
ISBN: 978-0-385-73089-1
one
The sheriff leaned back with his feet on the desk, watching the blond-haired boy. He was a little man with a sunburned face, with white eyebrows that looked strange on all the redness of his forehead. His cowboy boots had shiny snakeskin tops, and he sat tapping the toes together. There was a blob of blue bubble gum squashed onto one of the soles.
He watched the boy for a long time before he said, quite suddenly, "You ever heard of fingerprints, kid?"
The boy looked up.
"I could take you into the back there and print you," said the sheriff, "and I'd get what I want like that." He snapped his fingers. "I'd know your whole name and your address and everything."
The blond-haired boy had a dog beside him. He was petting the dog as he sat in front of the sheriff's desk, in a wooden chair with arms. The ceiling fan that turned slowly above him trailed shreds of cobwebs round and round.
"Now, is that the route you want to take?" said the sheriff.
"How could you know my name and address from fingerprints?" asked the boy. He looked at his fingers. "I don't think you can do that."
"Oh, you don't think I can do that," said the sheriff. "A real little Perry Mason, aren't you?"
The boy said nothing. He had said hardly a word in an hour and twenty minutes.
The sheriff sighed. He tapped the toes of his boots together. "Say, that's a nice dog you got," he said. "What do you call him, sonny?"
The blond-haired boy didn't answer.
"Aw, come on!" The sheriff swung his feet to the floor and slammed a hand on the desk. "Holy moley, what's the harm in telling me the name of your dog?"
The boy shrugged. "Maybe you should fingerprint him."
"Oh, that's funny. Yeah, that's just hysterical." The sheriff opened a drawer in his desk and took out a key. "You want to sit in the cage and tell jokes to yourself? Is that what you want?"
"I don't care," said the boy.
"Then that's what you'll do."
When the sheriff stood up the boy stood up, and the dog stood up beside him. They walked in a line through the office, past the table where the lady had sat typing till dinnertime. There was a police radio there, and a teletype machine, and a shiny kettle that reflected the whole room and the turning fan.
The dog's claws ticked on the floor. The boy wished the lady would come back, because the lady had seemed nice. She had smiled at him all the time--just smiled and typed and talked on the radio.
"You had your chance, sonny," said the sheriff. He took the boy and the dog down a flight of concrete steps, down to a corridor with a jail cell on each side. He put his key in a lock and opened a cell, sliding the bars across with a rattle of metal. There was a bed in there, and a toilet, and that was all.
"Empty out your pockets," said the sheriff.
The boy did as he was told, embarrassed by the things that came out. There was a rubber band and a bit of string, a bottle cap, an old penny, a plastic man without a head. The sheriff took it all in one hand. "In you go," he said.
The boy went into the cell. The dog followed behind him.
The sheriff drew the bars into place, then turned his key and pulled it out. "When you're ready to tell me where your home is, just holler," he said. He went up the stairs in his snakeskin boots.
The boy stretched out on the bed. His dog climbed up beside him, settling down with its head on his chest.
"Don't worry," said the boy. His hand touched the dog's neck, and his fingers buried themselves in the black fur. "We'll get to the Cape, and it'll be okay. It'll all work out when we get to the Cape."
The dog fell asleep. But the blond-haired boy lay awake, staring at the bars and the bricks. "We gotta keep going," he told the sleeping dog. " 'Cause we can't go back. That's the thing--we can't ever go home again."
He looked at the lightbulb on the ceiling. Then he squinted and tried to imagine that it was the sun, and that he was lying outside on the grass with his dog. He thought about his home.
two
The Rivers lived in an old gray house in a valley named Hog's Hollow. All around, in every direction, the city stretched for miles and miles. To the west was an airport, to the north an industrial park. To the south were glass towers and skyscrapers and freeways choked with cars. But down in the Hollow, it was quiet and calm.
There was a single street laid out like a worm on the valley floor, and only nine houses, all sturdy and aged like the great nests of American eagles. There were seventeen people, but only three children. There were six cats and one dog.
A narrow stream called Highland Creek flowed southward through the Hollow, creeping past the cottonwoods. Danny River liked to play there, building dams of sticks and mud. Beau, his brother, sometimes helped him smash them.
Their father's name was Charlie. But the boys and their friends talked of him as Old Man River. They imagined that he never knew, though Charlie had used the same name for his own father when he was the age of his sons.
For a living, Old Man River pumped out septic tanks. He owned a black truck with a huge tank on its back and a little cab at the front, and he wore green clothes and brown boots, and carried his keys on a jangling hoop at his waist. He could peer into a septic tank, like a wizard into a crystal ball, and see the lives of people. He could divine, in a glimpse, what they ate, and what they tried to flush away, and what colors they were painting their walls. "There are no secrets from the septic man," he'd say.
Then there was Mrs. River. It was as though she had slept through the early sixties. While other ladies were trying to dress like Jackie Kennedy, she looked like Eleanor Roosevelt. Florence was her name, but Flo she was called. Little Flo River, barely five feet high, talking sometimes like Scarlett O'Hara.
Altogether, the Rivers seemed a bit odd to the people of the Hollow, who saw that big truck parked in the yard, and the Old Man always tugging at his filthy cap, and Flo in her cotton dresses, and Danny wading barefoot through the creek. "The hillbillies of Hog's Hollow"; that's what the Rivers were called.
In the whole family, it was said, Beau was the only normal one. He did well at school, and he read books and he wondered about things like pollution and the Cold War. Only Beau, it was whispered, would ever amount to anything. "But that Danny," women would add, "oh, that Danny--isn't he a sweetheart?"
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Excerpt From: Fifteen Days
Written by: Christie Blatchford (more books)
Category: Current Affairs - Military; Social Science - Popul
Format: Hardcover, 400
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
(link)
ISBN: 978-0-385-66466-0
3 August 2006 –
“Blackest day of my life. Four perfect men lost, seven others injured. . . . The day will be marked by acts of heroism– some witnessed, some described to me. I will have to tell the story someday, when I can do so without choking up.”
–from Ian Hope to Christie Blatchford Saturday 8/5/2006 1:40 p.m.
By July 2006, Task Force Orion was a killing machine.
Named for the conspicuous constellation of stars known as the Hunter, Orion was the Canadian battle group made up of the soldiers of the 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in Edmonton; a company from the 2nd Battalion and a battery of gunners from 1st Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, both based in Shilo, Manitoba; and combat engineers.
Even into the early spring, the soldiers of Roto 1, as the sevenmonth tour in Kandahar Province was called, had confronted many tests that tax a soldier’s resolve and ingenuity. But they had yet to face fullfledged combat.
The troops were being blown up regularly, killed and maimed by Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) planted by an enemy who went unseen and largely uncaught.
They met endless groups of village elders, and older Afghan men who appointed themselves elders, in countless shuras, or consultations. Most of these were peaceful, if occasionally galling, because the soldiers suspected, and in a few cases damn well knew, that some of the same men laying bombs by night or with certain knowledge of who was doing so would sit cross-legged with them by day, swilling glass after glass of chai tea and nodding agreeably.
The Canadians patrolled on foot and in armoured vehicles and spent long stretches exploring territory, climbing stony hills, searching caves, and living rough far away from the huge base at Kandahar Air Field (KAF) or the little strong points they periodically called home.
“We were basically introducing ourselves–we’re not the Soviets, we’re not the Americans,” Chief Warrant Officer Randy Northrup, the Patricias’ Regimental Sergeant Major (RSM), says of their long, slow start. “We were pissing in our corners. Our mantra was, Go do something, in case he just don’t know who his daddy is.”
I spent four or five days in March 2006 out with Alpha Company’s 3 Platoon, and the only nerve-racking moment came as we were climbing to 6200 feet and a boulder gave way under Captain Sean Ivanko, who was checking out a far-flung cave. He dropped several heart-stopping feet before nimbly grabbing on to another chunk of rock.
Things were so quiet in those days, even pastoral where we were, that I remember wondering to myself, in that remarkably condescending and vainglorious manner journalists the world over have perfected, if the Patricias weren’t playing soldier and maybe laying it on a little thick for my benefit.
In any case, for all that they dared, tried to tantalize, and practically begged the enemy to reveal himself, in those early months he did not.
LieutenantColonel Ian Hope, the Patricias’ commanding officer, remembers that they’d receive intelligence that the Taliban were in a particular area. “Where are they?” “Everywhere.” “What villages?” “All of them.” “When?” “Every day.” “What about the mountains?” “In the mountains too.”
The Taliban almost certainly were there, probably much of the time, but this was their turf, and they alone would decide when the battle was on. “They weren’t ready to fight,” Hope says. “They weren’t ready to fight until sometime in April.”
Because the Patricias were then operating on their own as a Canadian battalion, the considerable fighting they did in late spring and early summer of 2006 received scant attention.
But fight they did, spending weeks in contact–which means in contact with the enemy–and meeting the Taliban in the first of what would add up to more than fifty significant and fierce engagements.
Jon Hamilton, the then twenty-nine-year-old captain of the reconnaissance or recce platoon, first fired his weapon on February 4 in his initial week on the ground in Afghanistan during the operational handover from American troops. At that time, the event was so startling he was quizzed about it.
“I remember actually sitting down with the colonel and the operations officer and they were going, like, ‘Okay, what the hell’s going on here, Jon?’ I was like, ‘I fired my weapon in support of coalition troops. I don’t understand what the problem is here.’”
Hamilton believes he was the first Canadian soldier on the tour to fire a shot, and suspects that as soon as word of it got back home, which in our age means almost instantaneously, military bureaucrats in Ottawa had their knickers in a knot. “Now,” he says, “that seems so stupid . . . so insignificant compared to what lay ahead.”
By the end of July, Hamilton, his two dozen men, and the rest of the battalion were battle-hardened and so inured to the roar of combat that they were lighting up smokes and cracking jokes with rounds raining down on them.
“This is the kind of stuff you get used to,” Hamilton says. “And it’s not complacency or laziness. It’s just the shit that happens in battle, it’s the human mind protecting itself from going insane or something. It’s the way soldiers are.”
For recce, July 4 was the turning point. Hamilton’s platoon was doing a route reconnaissance near the spot where he’d first fired his weapon months earlier, about 160 kilometres north of Kandahar city and sufficiently far north of Forward Operating Base (FOB) Martello that they were out of the comfort zone, and range, of their enormous artillery guns. They had the usual Afghan complement– the always present “Afghan face” of every mission, though Hope says in retrospect that the only Afghan face they saw consistently on their operations was that of the Taliban. With recce in this instance were some Afghan National Police (ANP), the leastloved element of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF).
En route, the small convoy found a village road blocked off with rocks at both ends. Hamilton stopped to question the village elder and was told the Taliban had been there during the night.
“Why would they block off the road?” he asked himself. “Is there somebody high up here? They know we’re gonna stop, they need to slow us, and that gives them time to bugger off. That’s kind of what we were led to believe.” Guard up, moving single file, their little group of G-Wagons– recce travelled the whole tour in these versatile Jeep-like boxes, the least protected of Canada’s otherwise armed-to-the-teeth fleet–was just cresting a small rise when Sergeant Jeff Schnurr, the 3 section commander, looked off to the right.
The army has a formal procedure for the sighting of enemy, just as it has a formal procedure, or form, for every eventuality and every thing. That’s both why it works and why it can make smart men crazy. This particular procedure is called a fire control order, and it’s supposed to be done the same way every time–something like, “Contact, reference hill 600 metres left.”
But what Schnurr barked to his light machine gunner Corporal Jimmy Funk was, “Jim, they’re on the right! Fuck ’em up!”
“The old expression, Catch somebody with their pants down,” Hamilton says, “well, literally, that’s what we did. These guys were obviously armed, they had the chest rigs on [brassiere-like systems of straps and pouches for carrying ammunition], and they were having their lunch by the river. And they were undressed–you know, shoes off and everything.”
Hamilton, Schnurr, Sergeants Willy MacDonald and Mars Janek, and about three others moved in on foot, while the rest of the platoon remained with the G-Wagons, gunners spinning around the turrets as the Taliban began to return fire.
“These guys didn’t have a chance,” Hamilton says. “We just wiped them out. And I can remember seeing half a dozen of ’em and looking through a scope and shooting and watching guys drop. I thought, Jesus, this is a turkey shoot, these guys are done. There’s got to be at least six bodies down there. I look over at Willy, and we just kind of looked at each other and I just gave the order to cease fire. Because we had clearly won the firefight.”
The Taliban is respected, however reluctantly, for retrieving their dead and wounded as scrupulously as the Canadians do; their practice is to maintain harassing fire just long enough to pick up their fallen comrades. And that’s what they did, buying themselves time until they could run out through a wadi, one of the dried-up riverbeds that are far more common than actual rivers in the south.
It wasn’t long before Hamilton and MacDonald were down by the stream. They found clothes everywhere, the remains of the men’s lunch, shoes, five or six AK-47s and a Rocket-Propelled Grenade (RPG), but only one dead body, a young man of seventeen or eighteen at most, his chest rig full of bullet holes.
Hamilton was infuriated. He’d seen men falling with his own eyes through his scope, and so had MacDonald. Besides, “I know the difference between troops making shit up and not, and I know my guys just aren’t like that. And I know myself, I watched this guy drop, where the hell is he? I told Willy, ‘We only found one, where the fuck are they?’ And he [said], ‘I dunno, man.’”
Then they spotted a blood trail, and what Hamilton had learned in an advanced reconnaissance course taught at Gagetown, New Brunswick, was suddenly useful. When he took the course, he remembers, he’d thought, “What the hell, this is World War II stuff, tracking Germans through the hills. What a waste of time. I knew so much then.”
So they followed the trail, about 300 metres from the actual contact itself. “We picked it up, we lost it, we picked it up, we lost it, and sure enough, we come up to a bush and there’s a guy lying underneath and an ANP guy is pointing at him.”
The injured man was older than the dead teen, maybe twenty-five, and he was bleeding from a round that had entered his buttocks and exited through the front of his leg.
Hamilton’s head filled with memories of lost friends and colleagues–particularly Captain John Croucher, seriously wounded in a May 25 IED strike–and, with adrenalin from the firefight still flooding through him, he was enraged.
“Willy had to calm me because I was pissed,” he says. Looking at the wounded man, “I said, ‘Why the fuck should I pass you up?’ And I was telling him this through my interpreter, and I said, ‘If I was under the bush there, bleeding, and you came across me, what would you do to me?’
“And he said, ‘Oh, I’d take you back to my compound and heal you up,’ and I said, ‘That’s bullshit.’
“And I know it, because about two days earlier, out in Helmand Province [the British AO, or Area of Operation], they caught two Brits and they basically beheaded one of them and dragged the other behind the truck, so I know what they do to people they catch.
“And I said, ‘That’s bullshit. Because I’m better than you, because we’re better than you, I will heal you up and patch you up and take you back.’”
Hamilton had with him a medic, who did tend to the man’s wounds–good thing, too, because it took about three hours before a Black Hawk landed to take the Talib to the base hospital at KAF.
While they were waiting for the chopper, the platoon rounded up the captured weapons, but had to retrieve them from the ANP because they had found the injured man first and “had already scrounged everything off the guy, so it was just a complete waste of any possible intelligence that was on him. But those pricks had already rifled through him. I managed to claw back the weapons from them, and I gave them the RPG and then was told we’re not allowed to give them RPGs and it was a fight to get it back. You almost have to punch them out to get stuff back from them.”
That was Hamilton’s first real firefight as a commander, and it was an all-round success.
“I don’t pretend to be Rommel or anything like that,” he says. “It’s just the conditions were right: We managed to surprise them, I had the terrain advantage with that high ridge there, and for once–probably the only time–we probably outnumbered them. And had superior firepower, all those things that as a commander, in the perfect war, in a perfect battle, you want to have checked off in your box.”
And, thanks to Schnurr’s giddy announcement, recce came up with what Hope later called “the best fire control order I have ever heard. We preach ‘effects-based planning’ so as to determine the clear definition of what exact effect it is that we want to produce upon the enemy,” he said in an email. “Clearly, throughout the tour, I wanted to ‘fuck ’em up’ more often than not, but I am too educated to articulate with such clarity an exact meaning.”
From July 4 onward, Hamilton says, “anyone who even messed with us, and they picked on us because we looked smaller and weak, we just hammered the crap out of them with everything we had.”
It was during this period that recce conducted what Hamilton describes as “recon by force–drive till somebody shoots at you.” The platoon was nicknamed the Bullet Magnets by Major Kirk Gallinger, with whose Alpha Company it most often worked.
The lessons came as fast as the RPGs for the sophisticated young Hamilton, who was raised in the small rural town of Norwood, Ontario, and environs but who spent two years in his wife Carolina’s home country, Venezuela. There he picked up a bit of Spanish and took bets on sports for a bookie, before coming home and landing a job in the exportimport field (he brought meat from Mexico to Brampton) he had studied at college.
“And I hated it,” he says. “Detested it.”
He applied to the military but didn’t hear a word for eight months–typical for the Canadian army circa the turn of the century, which usually acted as though applicants ought to be grateful if they were even given a look and whose top speed tended toward the glacial. “I thought it was dead and gone–‘No, we don’t want him’–and then I got this call out of the blue.”
He was twenty-three, and he was in.
Hamilton’s grandfathers had both been in the military. One, Major-General G.G. Brown, was a former colonel of the regiment who fought in the Second World War. Brown lived in Calgary, but the family had a small cottage on an island in Quebec where they all gathered in the summers. “He loved to spend time with his grandkids. He’d appoint one sergeantmajor for the day, make sure the chores got done. I had no idea what a sergeant-major was at that age, but then he’d tell us enough, stories about him being wounded.”
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