The Parking Lot
...it is mid to late afternoon, summer. I have finished running blueprints in my father’s architectural office 15 E. Washington Street, and head out across the dusty parking lot toward the Crandall Park Library. Gravel crunches with each step. There is a narrow alleyway between buildings on the short walk from the parking lot to Maple Street. My hands smell faintly of developer fluid. Seen from the parking lot, the sun hangs above the city skyline between the steeple of Church of Messiah and the Methodist Church, an orange-red ball in a steely overcast August sky. Somewhere nearby a live band is playing Louie-Louie. It is coming from the upper floor of a brick warehouse building at 14 Maple Street, and is apparently a club with an entrance off the alley. In the scene, I am too young to be admitted to the dance. There are some pretty girls waiting to get in...
* * *
It took a while to consider when that memory trace was dated.
Memories rarely come with a convenient and definitive date and time stamp.
The work for the week had come to a stopping point when the electronic remote control for the wine pump malfunctioned. A replacement was rushed out Thursday from Wisconsin, but there was nothing to be done without a pump.
It happened that the nearest disc on the desk was Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring, one of the more inspirational symphonic works in February each year, and the snow from Friday night and early Saturday morning made outdoor work uncomfortable despite the free time over the weekend.
Fact was, in the process of readying the tractor snow plow Friday afternoon, the engine cut off after a gust of white smoke.
Water in the fuel line.
It was too late Friday afternoon to do much but fret about having just used the last firewood stacked near the farm house.
There would be no plow for the long gravel driveway, and no hydraulic bucket for easy transfer of cut firewood from its pile on the hill top, closer to the door and nearby den fireplace.
What logs and kindling were needed as the fire burned low to a glowing pile of cooling embers, had to be hauled down slope by hand, one armload at a time.
Saturday morning was chilly and starting the fire was not pleasant but once roaring, it was too tempting to ignore the stranded tractor, its filthy fuel filter and the problem of clearing and cleaning the filter bowl and fuel line.
The chore out of the way after a run to the local tractor parts store, it was again tempting to sit inside where it was warm and do what has become habit for each of the past decade of winter months: catching up on neglected emails and polishing the previous few weeks’ writing.
* * *
The theme that offered the most promise was the year 1943.
In part, it was the massive public response online, to the contemporary Spielberg-Hanks epic Masters of the Air based on the youthful aircrews of the 100th Bomb Group that manned heavy B-17s before the introduction of long- rage fighter protection in 1943 of the Second World War.
February 19th approached. It would be my daughter’s 37th birthday.
There was an unpublished manuscript of competent, if not especially brilliant narrative, left by an uncle, and based on his combat experience in February 1943 in Tunisia, North Africa.
The manuscript had been sent to my father but had not been revised and edited before the uncle’s death, then his own death at an advanced age. There was a gap in the center of the novel which concerned itself primarily with a company of U. S. 19th Combat Engineers and the creaky freighter that carried them overseas, first to Ireland early in the war before their trip to Tunisia.
The central section, on typed paper left blank, held a note in the uncle’s handwriting that the blank pages, unwritten, were to be filled in, about the actual fighting at Kassarine Pass, Tunisia, on February 19, 1943.
After extensive research on the order of battle, the first major American military loss to the Afrika Korps of General Erwin Rommel, the panorama and events took on a distinctive impression.
The uncle, let him be known as Steve to maintain some anonymity, along with a few hundred American infantry and combat engineering soldiers, were captured and sent to the rear as POWs. He was in his mid-twenties when he suffered a severe head wound shortly before being captured. The American Red Cross did convey his letters home, which were extensively censored by German military authorities.
My view out the window here is the same as the one in our dining room at home, was an encoded message that was not caught and deleted by the Nazi authorities.
His parents had a framed 19th century landscape painting above the sideboard, of fishing boats near Naples Bay, Italy. It offered them a clue to his place of captivity and hospitalization.
Within a year, but before the war ended, he was exchanged and went home on medical leave and off active duty service.
* * *
His mother had been Poet of the Year (1952), had among her published work, a poem that described the kitchen scene overheard, of Steve sitting at the table, trying to explain to his father what had happened.
…they caught us between the sea and the salt marsh…
It only occurred many years later, that the blank chapters of Steve’s sole fictional manuscript were not written out of procrastination or neglect.
The fact was, Steve could not write the events of February 19, 1943, that took place on the slopes on either side of the Kassarine Pass that night when the 19th Combat Engineers were surrounded and mauled by German storm troops, after being abandoned by their retreating, badly decimated and untested fellow infantry and armor units.
The American commander Freydendahl had chosen to issue orders from the safety so far behind American line he could not possible assess the dynamic situation at Kassarine Pass. The green and underequipped First American Army had been wholly outclassed by German panzer columns filled with veterans of disciplined and well-equipped German Wehrmacht troops superbly led by Feldmarschal Rommel himself.
There was no honor or glory for those captured that day.
Rommel proceeded through the tattered American positions west of the pass in pursuit of the routed Americans, but by circumstances beyond his control, lost the momentum and he was turned back slowly.
* * *
It took fifty years, but eventually Steve was able to speak to school classes as a veteran.
You just don’t know what it’s like. Holding a .45 caliber pistol in the face of someone who looks like every other one of your blond-haired high school teammates, and pulling the trigger…
So, too, 1943 was the year American composer Aaron Copeland, began work on Appalachian Spring, at request of the famous New York City choreographer Martha Graham.
It seemed a timely, reflective ballet as background music for a February Saturday afternoon in 2024 when it is too cold to go out and fix a tractor.
People will think me crazy. But there was something full of wonder and beauty about the tank and artillery explosions across the desert plain when the German attack opened…
The notion of the coming spring season in the Appalachian foothills of northern Virginia seemed hopeful despite the snow.
But Copeland, who finished the ballet score in 1944 in New York City, was not talking about Piedmont wildflowers or season.
American choreographer Martha Graham was a fan of the late American poet Hart Crane (1899-1932), who had written a long epic poem in sight of the Brooklyn Bridge. Crane was describing a natural running water seep not located in the south, but in the Adirondack Mountain wilderness of Upstate New York.
Crane’s father, an entrepreueur, had invented a classic American candy mint he had called Life Savers. He sold the patent before it had become a popular commodity, and made no money from the manufactured, long popular item.
Thus, despite its evocative and winsome cadences, Appalachian Spring is neither about Appalachia nor is it about a season.
It serves its purpose however, and admirably, as background to other winter thoughts and the tragedy playing out with the fall of Avdiivka.
* * *
When the music ended, there was time to check various emails about the flashback.
Classmates online slowly filled in seemingly unimportant details.
The club had been a Youth Center with a minimum entry age of 16. Jerry Lewis and the Playboys had played a concert in that small Warren County hometown in 1965, but this was not possible to confirm.
The club had hosted local bands, it seemed.
The building was still there, and the Youth Club, originally on Warren Street near the Strand and Rialto movie theaters, had changed addresses away from the middle of the small city and its crime.
More about the flashback, then. That first job running blue prints had required official working papers, as was the case for anyone of age 14.
There were other musical clues from when pop songs had been recorded and when they peaked high in the national Pop Chart ranking for those years.
The architectural office on Washington Street had long been demolished, and the architect himself died in 2003.
When asked whether the Youth Center had served drinks so long ago, one classmate replied, no, but her underage drinking had been done anyway, in the nearby parking lot.
It suddenly seemed as if the line of young girls waiting to go in, in his flashback, might well have, unbeknownst to him, included her all those years before, although neither had known the other at the time, and had not established rapport until social media was well-entrenched fifty or sixty years later...
* * *