Gosh, we were lucky

"A tinkling piano in the next apartment
A stumbling word that told you what my heart meant
O, how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things remind me of you"

The words of the song come back so easily from fifty or more years ago and remind me of the 1930s when my genration grew up == just in time to be drafted or to volunteer for the Armed Services to help fight the war against the Nazis and the Japanese. Some might say we were unlucky , but most of us did not feel that way. We wanted to be part of The Great Crusade.

But in another sense we were very lucky. The 1930s was a time when movies and radio and recordplayers were just coming into their own and were changing popular culture, and we in this country had the best of many , many talented song writers, bands, singers and dancers.. I'll put my personal favorites in parentheses - Cole Porter (Night and Day); Harold Arlen ( Paper Moon); Ira and George Gershin ( you name it ), Irving Berlin, Jerome Kerns (A Fine Romance); Rogers and Hart ( I didn't know what time it was)

How lucky can you be to have grown up with the great bigbands: Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Bunny Berigan and so on. Any middle class guy could take his girl to hear them play and dance the night away.

.....The Glen Island Casino in Rye, New York was about forty miles from where I lived with my family and as soon as I was sixteen and had my drivers License, I could take the family car, pick up my girl and listen and dance to one of those great bands and get home by 1 a.m.

Now that we have been through ( or are going through the horrors of "rap") how good those old songs sound. In "these foolish things" I could not remember the ending of one line, but my wife of fifty years easily supplied it. They were wistful songs. You had either lost your girl or weren't making any progrees with her or you imagined she was Ginger Rogers and you were dancing with her.

The we went off to war and it all changed. But the memories stayed and undoubtedly helped carry us through some tough spots. Today whe we see a rerun on tv of Fred and Ginger these old feeling come back and we can remember that special kiss when the band started " Goodnight Sweetheart" and the lights went down.

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I was reminded of all this when I recently picked up one of my alltime favorite history books - "The Borrowed Years 1938-1941" by Richard Ketchum. A marvelous picture of the social and political life in the United States in the years between Munich and Pearl Harbor. Get it if you have not read it. It is truly the way it was for many of us who lived it.

Disaster repeated

Apparently the president is going to recommend sending additional combat troops to Iraq. Have we learned nothing from the past? If we do that, the reaction of the Arab world will be: Invasion #2. We told you that the US meant to stay in Iraq and secure the oil and remake our world in the image of the US......Woodrow Wilson's phrase "Make the world safe of democracy" will again lead us down the garden path to further disaster. We can only hope that the Democrats and a number of Republicans will oppose any such plan . I see that McCain is now ataching a number of caveats to his approval and I believe that even his modified position will finish his chances of the Republican nomination. The Generals on the scene oppose it, but the President goes ahead even though he has been telling us for years that he takes his cue from those on the spot. I pray and hope that "the country" in whtever form will rise up and put a stop to any such plan. Too bad we can't do what they do in the corporate world and with unsuccessful football coaches - give him a huge bonus and the boot.

Death and Dying

Here i am in my middle 80s and yet I am startled and of course very sad when one of my contemporaries dies. This weekend I lost two old buddies that I have known for more than 60 years and more intimately the last 5-6 years than when we were in college. What business did you have , dying like that ? And you did not tell me in advance so that we could reminisce about the good times and the ups and downs of our respective lives. One of them took a bad fall and cracked his head and the subsequent operaration could not save him -- I just can't believe that that ebbulient, lively, optimistic spirit is no long with us.........................we WWII Vets are fast going. I want to hang in there very badly and see my daughters through their problems and my grandchildren strike out on their own. I am not a careful person, but I am trying reform and drive more slowly and walk more carefully and get plenty of sleep. Let's hope that works. I particularly want to get through to the Fall when Ken Burns' 14 hour documentary on WWII - called THE WAR - is on public tv.....................A modest hope and one that I am sure I will fulfill. As sure as one can be about anything in this uncertain life.