the gift of mirth

13th entry to The Colonel`s Scrapbook
Laughter

Born on a day like today were
1860 Gustav Mahler Kalischat Bohemia Austria, composer/conductor (Titan),poor cuckold 1887 Marc Chagall Vitebsk Russia, artist (I & The Village),the world was never as beautiful as in his paintings
1752 Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented programmable loom and we follow him by knitting our own plans
1907 peerless Frida Kahlo is born in Coyoacàn ,Mexico, the greatest Latin American paintress.
1898 US annexes Hawai and the last queen,Liliuokalani,retired to make quilts and had no laughter about her situation

“Every woman who laughs hard is a queen, and the majority of times a man, of course ,is her buffoon.”
Being in front of the keyboard, my hair gathered atop my head in a knot in any old way, the stars off my shoulders but ready to dance a ballet in my eyes, a smile involuntarily climbs to my mouth. I conjure up the image of a man walking in his white tunic, laughing his head off. He said the atom was indivisible. Big deal, I don`t remember him for this. So many anecdotes about his good nature, his readiness to laugh and how loved he was by everyone despite the fact that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth-a rich man`s sunny kid. Even at age 90 this outstanding Greek didn`t wilt just because his eyesight was poor. In 370 he left this world and he left us with the image of laughter as an eternal remedy. You told me I had been born with a silver, or was it gold, spoon in my mouth. In a mouth that was also destined to be laughing most of the time. I am in love with laughter. Mirth is the glibenclamide with metformin that keeps the glucose of my good wit in balanced shape. Which is why my doctor can`t understand why I am not the typical overedgy, ill-tempered diabetic
I will never understand anyone who travels through life without a sense of humor. Laughter has been an essential ingredient throughout my 48 years of being in this crazy world. The first time I was aware of laughter was when I was a little kid and we had a very ugly dog called Whisky. Some years before I gloriously entered this world after my mommy had the bad sense to ride an angry stallion bareback when she was 6 and three weeks pregnant, accelerating my dèbut, the dog had been hit on the left hind leg by a passing motorcycle. The animal had been given loving care and medical attention, and no scars remained on his body.He didn`t even limp when he ran. But every time one of the delivery messengers that worked at a super-drugstore located one block away passed, Whisky would piteously howl, lower his arse,and drag both hind legs behind him. His trauma was working on him. It was a sorry and funny sight at the same time. Which brings me down to pointing something out for you: Whisky was a male.
Humour can be like an unexpected pail of water thrown over you. Sometimes you need it.
Sometimes males need it desperately so they can gain insight into their own perspectives. Even us females need it. Which is why my favourite student will continue being my pet pupil for as long as he keeps his bubbly wit. It is the same guy that when I told him I loved sunflowers because I identified with them, that they were bright-fringed but with a sinister center like me, he added they also were used for oil, in reference to the fact that I am a woman with ample girth. And even more mirth. He has never let me hide in any corner of gloom, not even when I broke my ankle last January. Guardian of my peals of laughter, I could not live without him. Let`s hope I never have to feel what it is like not having him around.
Humour has made my history class one of the preferred courses for students of all age. I don`t know if it happened to you that the history class was a period of watching fungus grow on the wall, so boring it was. So many treaties, dates, borders, lines of succession. What for? Do you remember all that ?What for? But when your teacher tells you that emperor Humayun, barely a dash to genealogically join Babar the Tiger to Akbar the Great, died when he tripped over his own feet and landed at the bottom of the steps on his arse, the air gets lighter around the classroom. History is full of guffaws like this one because it is made by people, and people are always causing laughter even when they believe they want tears.
99 per cent of time, when women laugh, we are queens. Queens because only queens can afford having a buffoon. Buffoons are always men. Preferrably our men. Or the ones who try to pull our leg by saying they are ours, when thank heaven the poor mites don`t even belong to themselves. “Our” males who think of ownership in their terms but never in ours. Thank life they do not belong to us, I would be terribly appalled to have one tied in my backyard, least of all without an owner`s manual and fearing that any moment, he will spring up like an ape, grab me around the neck and wrestle with me in the mud. When our house cat is no longer nimble for us to see him being chased by the nimbler mice, screeching at us to save him or he will have a stroke…sometimes we look for a aqueak toy
elsewhere. Some very inexpensive ones can be had anywhere,from your neighbourhood to the internet. I found a particularly comic one in the internet, and he gives me a big run for the big gob of money I pay for the internet service that doesn`t work all the time The poor chap not only howls better than a shot coyote when he stresses the u in you, but he jumps up and down as if he were stuck on a pogo stick, recommends several brands of metallic intimate toys and then when he finally gets over what he is doing, he has a lot of cleaning up to do. Do men realize how vulnerably ridiculous they sound when proclaiming eternal bliss through the ether of internet? Specially with their nether parts already dangling droopingly like a limp dishtowel in their hands?.
Now you will question me, ok, madam if men are the clowns 99 per cent of time, what happens with the rest, with the 1 per cent? What do women laugh at in that 1 percent? Ourselves, heart of my reading hours, ourselves. Ourselves when our pheromones are in gear, when we have been so silly as to believe in your gossamer promises, your unexcusable excuses to cover the fact that most men are born liars and will follow Newton`s law of inertia by continuing to be like that unless some tragedy forces them to admit they were bullshitting us.. Women in love can be even more ridiculous than men in the same hopeless situation. Look at stupid Gustav Mahler, born on a day like today, running wild over his wife Alma, who cuckolded him with anyone and anything in sight.
How many lies, sweet little lies, like Fleetwood Mac sings, did she feed him? Wasn´t he the laughingstock of all Vienna? Laughter for the public, who didn`t even like Mahler` s extra-long, noisy and rambunctious symphonies. Man, always the cheap clown at the end of the festival.
It was wit, a sense of what is funny, what kept the Jewish Mexican painter Frida Kahlo going, despite her numerous pains and fractures and that huge accident that was for her Diego Rivera, her own burly husband. The same humour which made me realize how ridiculous I would look in a wheelchair for the rest of my life if I didn`t fight back so I could walk normally again as I do now.
Laughter has been called the golden rain from angel`s wings. It is sprinkled liberally over us when we are born, golden spoon like Democritus of Abderàs or mine, or not. Laughter is what money cannot buy, because you can pay the best comedian and not laugh. I understand why Mick jagger complained in his song Hard woman to please that his lover had wanted diamonds and not the laughter that he gave her. I, unlike the woman in Jagger`s hit, can tell anyone to keep the diamonds. I will continue laughing my way through life,and probably, when my heart is severed from my body to be thrown into the waters of my San Juan River, it will still be chuckling its way down into immortality.

the drop of napalm

12 th entry for The Colonel`s Scrapbook
July 6th

Oscar

1747 John Paul Jones naval hero ("I have not yet begun to fight") was born in Scotland, creator of the US Navy and Admiral in Empress Catherine the Great`s fleet1796 Nicholas I born in Russia, Tsar (1825-55), stubborn and lousy soldier,only listen to his cat Vashka`s advice
1937 Vladimir Ashkenazy born in Gorkey, Russia, pianist/conductor (Tchakowsky-1961)m one of Chopin`s best interpreters
Died
1189 Henry II King of England (1154-89), dies at 56.He had always regretted remarking in public that someone should rid him of prattling Thomas Bechett 1415 Jan Hus burned for heresy by the Church at Constance, Germany,So punish the Christians in such a merciful way-
1535 Sir Thomas More gets executed in England for treasonm in reality for meddling in his best friend`s marriage brouhahas
1996 Former guerrilla leader Oscar Cortez Marìn, who took Fortín Acosasco in Leòn during the 19790 insurrection, commits suicide, and some of us still grieve

On a day like today
1885 1st inoculation (for rabies) of a human being, by Louis Pasteur,father of microbiology

He promised me that one day I would find my own little drop of napalm to burn through my scepticism, to do away with my disbelief and to put me in a state of grace. But he didn`t say he wouldn`t be here to show me the ropes, to explain many things if the little drop of napalm was lost, missing,or diluted. Oscar Cortez Marìn, better known by his sobriquet of El Chele Marcos(Blondie Marcos), died by his own hand a day like today 12 years ago.He simply did it in the best Hemingway style , putting a bullet through his mouth, although he had not produced any novel yet. He would leave the writing to me, to me who should have been there but wasn`t.
The sweltering night wraps itself around my shoulders as a Jewish shawl made of memories. Right now, just up from an offtime nap, Oscar seeps into my fingers and types for me at the keyboard. He is my ghost guest writer tonight because now I understand how he felt when I didn`t come to his call. There is no worse pain or loneliness than needing someone who refuses to come or answer. Destiny has its way of dealing fair play,and kismet always sends you a bill. I got mine today. I will willingly pay. I wasn`t there when Oscar needed a shoulder to cry on. He had always had mine since we were toddlers, but it took one single night for this Chinese Wall of solidarity and tenderness to fragment itself into a million pieces.
When he put that bullet to his head, he was already one of Nicaragua`s most respected top ranking officers. Still in the army, I have to be truthful although this may mar the image that everyone, including you, could have of him. He was still on drugs. They had been his problem since high school, when he became a wiry, troubled adolescent who loved American football, wrestling and boxing. Why someone as smart and sagacious as Oscar ever got so hooked on drugs is a mystery to many, but things that happen in your childhood can leave your mind warped for the rest of your life. I will never forget when in 1988 I gave him the news that I was finally expecting a baby. His whole face lit up but then he grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me gently.”But you promise me that no matter what your kitten does to you, you will never tell him or her that he wasn`t meant to be born, that you regret having the baby?” I looked at him straight into his light eyes and understood why he was telling me this.”I have awaited, desired, planned and built a whole world around this pregnancy, too much to ever make that blunder,”I replied,and he smiled radiantly. ·You shall be the best mother cat in the whole world, a true lioness, I envy the gentleman or lady that you carry now,”he chuckled and hugged me so hard I felt my ribs folding into themselves.
Many people affirm that true friendship, unstained by sex, cannot exist between men and women. Oscar and I proved that wrong. So many years of knowing each other, of sharing secrets, confessions, and participating together in several experiences only tied the bond tighter. I will never forget the afternoon when he coaxed me to try a joint of marihuana. Yes, shocking, right? Madam smoked a joint. Disgusting. Well, he was so insistent that in order to get him off my back I took two draws from the offered joint. That was the worst thing I ever did. Almost immediately my poor stomach started churning and twisting,as when you put salt on top of a slug. I got sick. Revoltingly sick. White death, it is called in the drug addict`s jargon. He was alarmed. I left and when I got home I told my folks the truth. Mom as usual tried to hit first and then ask, but luckily my dad had come early from work and he was there to stave off my mother`s slaps. I just drank some alka seltzer with lemon juice, took a shower, brushed my teeth and slept a very needed nap.
My father told my mother that she should not hit me because I had trusted them with the truth. In fact,I have never tasted marihuana nor any other drug ever since. No need to.I am crazy enough the way I already am.
So many things bound me to this strange guy with curly hair and twisted smile. Even the fact that I almost broke his nose accidentally while playing American football. After the accident, we were both sitting in the school nursery, drenched in his blood, while our parents spoke to the principal. He was overjoyed when the military academy of his choice accepted him, and he was making plans at 100 miles per hour about my joining him the following year when I graduated from high school too. Even though I told him I would prefer going elsewhere, he insisted that the military was also for me. Was he right? Anyways I didn`t follow him to USA but went on my own to France. He got a bee in his bonnet when it finally dawned on him that I had not kept my promise, and he managed to wangle mi phone number from my dad and then called me to let out the most colourful stream of vitriol I have ever heard coming from a human mouth. At that moment I was a worried about my semester exams, but after they were over the sensation of loss came over me. Like having an arm amputated, or losing something you really valued. Whoever says friends are replaceable is giving you a big fat lie. I was never to fill the big gap that Oscar left, until I found him again in Nicaragua during the burial ceremony of Colonel Santos` Lopez supposed remains. No more vitriol, only happy tears.
We literally waltzed across the square. Nothing ever felt like home like being next to him. When we went on mission to Jalapa he was there when I got the bullet into my left knee. He was the one who took off his bandanna to recycle it as a tourniquet. It was him who sat on a bench, his camouflage all stained with my blood, not eating, not drinking even water, not moving until the doctor came out to tell him my leg wasn`t getting amputated. Three hours later that a nurse put me in a wheelchair, he was still there. I sent him home to change and rest.His eyes were swollen from crying. He blamed himself for everything. I just told him he was being very silly. All this was poured into my short story The Lost Bullet, which is an attempt to exorcise his ghost from me. Somehow I can`t stop blaming myself for his demise.
One night I was translating a confidential document for a multinational company. After haggling with the corporate manager who was to pay for the translation, we had settled on a lump sum and he had taken me into his office on the North Highway-the industrial area of Managua where all the factories are. I wasn`t to leave until I finished the whole thing and I would get paid immediately in cash. I was awfully short of money, and there were bills to be paid urgently. I remembered my grandmother saying that once you have a family to feed, friends end up in the backyard. So when Oscar called me saying this time it would be no bathtub full of cold water and his blood running from his wrists like he had done years ago, but that he was going to shoot himself, I told him I couldn`t mess up at my job because I needed the money. That is when he called me names, saying Jews overvalue money and not love, that when I came tomorrow morning he would just be dead and it would be my fault.I retorted that he had been killing himself for 37 years so why not get it over with once and for all. I should have never said that. I wish I could take time back and unsay those words. I slammed the phone and continued translating. When I finished, I got paid and was driven home.
The following morning an avuncular voice was on the phone telling me that Oscar had put a bullet through his head and that I was NOT invited to the funeral because it was my fault.
The world careened, sank under my feet. I didn `t go to the burial. I still don`t know where he was buried. I refuse to know to this day. He lives in my worst nightmares, and sometimes I see him running after me, with his broken head in his hands and the head instead of crying tears emits blood. I have tried writing him short stories,but it is no use. 12 years after his death he is more alive to me than when he was here. I am still his Orpheus, and he the beast I have to soothe. Just the fact that I am here, remembering him after so many years, convinces me that I had in my hands the best treasure a person can have:a friend. Anything after this will pale in comparison perhaps. Did Henry II Plantagenet feel this way after he woke from his nap to find that 4 courtiers had torn to pieces his best friend Thomas beckett? I know he went into penance ,crying, so much remorse filled his goblet of life. He was never the same after Beckett was killed. I have not been the same ever since. Maybe you now know the reason why I cannot attach myself to anything or anyone. I know that whatever made Oscar the perfect comrade doesn`t exist anywhere else in anyone else. We are unique, people, the sooner we realize that the better. I close this with a heavy heart, but with the memory of the smile that could have led me to my own little drop of napalm

Gravitation

11th entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
July 5th
On Principles and Principia
On a day like today
1810 Phineas Taylor Barnum was born in Bethel Conn, circus promoter (Barnum & Bailey).he was a pioneer of modern show business and the proud owner of the Biggest, Prettiest and Most Profitable Elephant of All Times, JUMBO
1687 Virgin Isaac Newton's PRINCIPIA was published by Royal Society in England, and ever since his laws get applied to all kind of nonsense and good sense
Venezuela : Independence Day (1811) Bolívar has severed the umbilical cord , but later he would regret all his sacrifices when he was spewing out his lungs with TB, reminding us that Latin America is an unruly and frightful place and the only thing ado here is to emigrate. Poor chap. All that sweat for nothing.
I have always felt a special fascination towards Sir Isaac Newton, the scientist which gave us the laws of gravity and therefore set us going in such diverse directions that nowadays we can apply them even to our cat`s tail,or to tears that sometimes alchemize themselves into peals of laughter. Each one is the owner and animal of his or her own circus, as Phineas T Barnum, who was born a day like today, could tell you. So today I am an old African witch doctor smelling of incense and fresh tobacco smoke from the memory of my Dad`s cigar, and I throw in a little sigh that no one ever is aware of, a few ounces of relief and the fact that I feel better from my dwindling flu. Perhaps it is the fact that today I have felt an almost imperceptible softening of that quartz and basalt monument inside my chest that a man in love could call heart, and I have spilled a little kindness to even those who try to order me around despite the fact that I will always be my own army general.
I see one eyebrow riding high over your glasses. Madam, what will you give us today. Isaac Newton`s long blond hair will now fascinate you more than my dark tresses? No, pearl of my wisdom, parure of my imagination, not exactly. How can someone so peerless ever doubt? And show not this only to a friend if you wish because you may be astounded by the vocabulary. Share it so everyone can know how loved you are, gentle reader, shadow of my smile. Not magic nor wizardry, but life that springs from itself to go to itself, everything we do will always retake us back to the man who would have discovered aspirin instead of the laws of gravity if pumpkins had grown on trees and one would have stricken him on the head instead of a simple apple. The day I met Sir Isaac in the classroom was a remarkable one, because thanks to his laws I would find logic to many things later to happen in my life, including the fact that I was privileged enough to find you.
Take for example LAW I, that states that “Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.” Perhaps Barry Manilow explained it better and more musically in a hit that he sang in the late seventies when I was growing up,·You remind me I live in s shell, safe from th e past and doing okay but not very well…” Did I really think I had it all in order?Unruffled waters, my San Juan River still in my border lap, comfy boots so I need to have asked for another pair, cats who didn`t shit on top of my luxurious quilt? A trip on fixed day to the bank, yes, ma`am- In steady motion, from corner to block from here to there. The force impressed thereupon this object in motion that I was came out of the blue, a signal under the bluest part of the camouflage within my sleeve, the slight brushing of an accidental angel wing. Why did I answer? What was knocking at the steel and crystal doors? But the end result was that I had a reply, and this reply has lead me to unending questions and even more answers which I didn`t know were replies by themselves. Will someday all this enthusiasm of changing motions, moving gears, ever fizz out? Could it have happened before without realizing it myself?But here we are, moving at the speed of dragonfly`s wings. Which brings us flat into LAW II, in which we hear Newton stating that the alteration of motion is ever proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed. so in plain old English if any force generates a motion, a double force will generate double the motion, a triple force
Can that explain the fact that a person can feel that a name can send his heart skipping into the happiest hopscotch of his o r her life, and the more she smiles the happier she feels?
The way we look at our own reality when we apply these laws existing in Principia! Can we say that even our principles that we have harboured since earliest childhood suddenly twist and trip and stumble and fall?
Which brings us to LAW III, which is that to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts. Don`t I understand what virgin Isaac said here! Particularly now, when I am undergoing a metamorphosis worse than the one the Jewish Czech writer Frank Kafka cooked up for the book of the same name. You know what I mean. And at the same time that a flow of hot effervescent blood stumbles and sings through a circulatory system infected with the unbearable virus of joy, the anguished mind and the frightened logic spin the equal and opposite reaction. This cannot be happening to me. The antibodies of reasoning work hard not to die in the battle against the essence of glee. Flee, escape, before you have said too much or felt the same, you are still on time before the vertiginous snapdoor of commitment locks you in, before the unquenchable thirst as if for Cocacola, wrings its gossamer fingers around your senses. Yes, every time you felt like holding on, the dark side of the moon that lives behind your temple also wold whistled at you and whispered in complicity that you could still get out.
Let me ask Isaac if he ever felt a whirlwind of iridescent leaves twirling around the nimble feet of summer, was there ever a tiptoeing moon coming through the window to lay by his white immaculate pillow and softly, so gently stroke his flowering temple? Maybe he can give us both an explanation for all those sensations of having seen it all before. Did he feel as much as ease as I do yarning with you when he was the Master of the Mint and ever. curious and evil-smelling Tsar Peter the Great came to ask him for a full explanation on how the coins were manufactured. Was there a subrepticious hand up anyone`s knee? Peter was so unprejudiced… and may life or history forgive my speculations. I guess there must have been some kind of chemistry that kept them chatting like old hens in a nest that day. Now, I do understand that feeling even if I poke fun at Isaac, whom I adore because he also invented the cat trapdoor so felines could go and come as they pleased without having to yowl at his door when he was busy or sleeping.
.Gravity, the blessed pull of gravity, the force that makes us hold our feet on to the ground,
The anchor needed to hook our dreams to reality, but to be lifted by the imagination so the ship of our desires can finally navigate. It had to be Newton the one to discover its laws. Did he understand the game of attraction so well? Could he have changed the term gravity for infatuation, because the pull is as strong, as constant, as insistent? All the mechanics of moving bodies apply to science and limerence. Exactly the same, don`t give or take anything. The rest is not a question of Newton`s Principia. Just a question of our principles, and if we want to forget them, there we go for better, for worse. Or for rapture.
The Principia brought Newton fame, publicity, and financial security. It established him, at the age of 45, as one of the greatest scientists in history. Happiness? I don`t think he ever was happy, as in fairy tales. But now I know that happiness also has its our motions and engines, and it is up to us to do anything possible and impossible to nab a touch from the skin of an angel.

fourth of July

Tenth entry for the Colonel`s Scrapbook
July 4th
Were born today:
1804 Nathaniel Hawthorne Massachussetts, author (House of 7 Gables, Scarlet Letter) Too bad that Demi Moore appeared in its sugary version with the ugliest naked man I have ever seen on film(Gary who really looks like an Old Man).
1807 Giuseppe Garibaldi unified Italy, and among its followers and benefactors was the mistress of Napoleón III, Virginia Oldoini Countess of Castiglione.
1826 Stephen Foster Lawrencevil, Pennsylvania, composer (Oh! Susanna, Swanee River).How could USA be so ironically cruel as to have let this guy die in poverty with only 38 cents in his torn pocket? Well that is capitalism for you! Now he has no use for the Stephen Foster Memorial at the University of Pittsburg.
1776 Declaration of Independence-US gains independence from Britain, but nobody signed until some time later, because they were scared to death that old fart King George III the Cuckoo would accuse them of treason while running around in his pissed nightgown through his palace.
1826 John Adams & Thomas Jefferson 2nd & 3rd presidents, die . How patriotic maya politician be in an effort to do things properly?1831 James Monroe 5th president, dies, but not his shiver-inspiring doctrine

1884 the Statue of Liberty was presented to the US in Paris.The government later was so grateful that if Hungarian-born Joe Pulitzer hadn`t started a campaign to raise funds for the platform, the “French broad” with the spiky crown would still be lying in pieces in its different crates.


" The bigger the bankroll, the tighter the band around it. "

Fireworks, but not because it is particularly today. Fireworks because I have managed to be again with you, my reader not to forget also my muse, the reason but never the excuse. In love which is a minor god we trust, it even rhymed this time.
It is a Friday, a fourth of July and fireworks may be breaking out like hordes of fireflies over in USA. But I have been having fireflies in my fingertips and fireworks in my eyes for ten days, since I first became the lighting rod towards somewhere in the middle of not exactly a Bumblebee`s Flight, and may old Rimsky-Korsakov forgive me for mentioning it so.
Today`s uniform already stacked into the laundry basket, the boots ready to lodge question marks, my nose still itching and sneezing, here I am again in front of the keyboard. My wish was only to say Happy Birthday USA. So I will celebrate, tip my glass of iced tea and toast you,gringos. Somehow there are some Yankees who have slipped under my skin. I remember blonde Andrea, crying when I left Strasbourg in 1981 to move to Paris. Kelly, who grew up with me in school, became a marine and died in Lebanon. Charles Ripley III, with his crazy blond Mozart-wig ponytail and screechy voice like Tedddy Roosevelt`s, fellow teacher and respected by many as a journalist. I would lie if I said I hate all Americans, because I love the everyday, common people of the United States. It is their government that I loathe. How would anyone in his right mind ever detest Mataoka(better known as Princess Pocahontas, who fell so hard and completely for her John Smith and then in order not to learn any other English name, simply married John Rolfe?)or stop admiring that Renaissance Man who was ugly Benjamin Franklin (I thank him for the bifocals that I am too vain to wear, I kiss him for his Poor Richard`s Almanac because I am not a real journalist either, and I forgive the fact that while flying the kite, he asked his unruly son to make time for him while he sat under a tree in the best moment of the storm), or stop laughing because General Georgie Washington was a founding father of the country but not of a real family because he was skimpy and he wore wig,silk stockings and dentures and wanted a reimbursement for all the money he spent while fighting for independence, but he did it once he was President? I can even forgive him his sterility, but not that he turned down an offering from the founder of the Green Berets and Rangers, Robert Rogers, when this expert warrior volunteered troops and advice.
There is so much to fall in love with in American history. I had subsequent crushes on Native American leaders, like the Flying Cross Tecumseh of the Shawnees, for whom I wrote my short story I`ll be back soon, more a tearjerker than a masterpiece of terror. Tecumseh, who was shot to death on October 5th 1813 by future president William Henry Harrison, who bragged about this murder when he went on campign. Tecumseh`s Curse, which worked on a good amount of American presidents who took office in years ending in 0, starting by the selfsame pompous ass-face Harrison who died of a pneumonia after his inaugural speech at the White House, being, fortunately. the briefest president who ever sullied the White House with his presence. The beautiful Osceola,of the Seminoles, whose wife was killed by the whites and who fought arduously to keep his tribe`s self-determination. Sacajawea, guide to the Lewis and Clark expedition(besides being the cook because back then women were fit only for the needle as Anne Bradstreet of colonial times said,or for the pot) is more valuable to me than any Hollywood sex goddess (although I still remember with so much tenderness the pictures Andre de Dienes took of Norma jean Baker, the peerless Marylin Monroe). How to forget the sensation of well- being I derived from reading the philosophical essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was introduced to me by my adored American teacher James Martin-to whom I owe my writing and perfect grammar…earlier I had all the intention of emptying my liver of bile,and I told you so. You told me, no madam, don’t you say that. Because you knew, dearest reader, that Henri David Thoreau`s Walden would stand in the way, not to mention Henry Wadsworth Longfellow`s Song of Hiawatha or even the shadow of Pluto and Catarina whom Edgar Allan Poe with his smell of moonshine inmortalized in The Black Cat. Nevermore, also chimed in Poe`s Raven, reminding me that love can turn anyone into a three-stars-on-the-epaulets version of Annabel Lee in her kingdom by the sea. How then would I have been able to remove that luscious, almost cloying feeling that reading Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman leaves behind on my feverish skin when I also imagine him,bearded,beautiful and in jeans-he was one of the first to wear the Jewish inmigrant Levi Strauss`attires for the workingman, even before anyone would dream of Bill Clinton wearing them.
As my own national bard Rubèn Darìo said in his Ode To Roosevelt, the United States is great as a nation, but only through its geniuses and poets and scientists. We as a whole world in unison hail the birth and works of Tomas Alva Edison(who was a real workaholic but killed more than 3500 dogs and cats and horses and rabbits trying to prove his direct current was better than the alternate one by George Westinghouse and forgot it was his wedding night with his first wife until he found her, neglected, crying in bed)) or Henry Ford( yes,I know, he didn`t like Jews nor unions, and he was awarded a medal by Hitler, you don`t have to remind me that) or William Sydney Porter(better known as the famous O Henry)with the surprise ending of his marvellous short stories and from who I learned so much.
When it is the fourth of July, I have to remind our neighbors up there that we are also Americans because from Alaska to the Strait of Magellan, this whole place is called America. I wish I could prove that the Greek dancer, philosopher and actor Agathon was wrong when he said that not even the gods can change the past, because that way I would ask you for permission to become a god and flush away in the toilet of oblivion the bloody stain of slavery, the burniong opf Washington in 1812, the killing of Stonewall Jackson by his own men during the Civil War even before the term friendly fire existed, the magnicide of Honest Abe Lincoln and his death on Good Friday, the eviction of the Seminoles and others in the Trail of Tears, the poking around of the surgeons into president James Garfield`s fat bearlike body when the bullet could have stayed there without harm, the carnage after the Battle of Little Bighorn just because George Armstrong Custer never knew when to stop(whether it was following his wife`s skirt or massacring Indians), not to mention when everyone accused porr Warren Gamaliel Harding of having been done away by his own wife who knew that Laddie Boy howled noisily every time Warrrrrrr`un was in the closet with Nan Britton breathing like a scared rabbit and rolling his eyes around in ecstasy) or the moment that Franklin Delano Roosevelt caught polio(although his handicap didn`t prevent him from being reelected or being adored by his little dog Fala or girls like Missy Le Hand).
I would erase Pearl Harbor even if I had to block out World War II, as I wouldn`t have a reason to kill Isoroku Yamamoto by chasing him with 16 planes as is he were some kind of Samurai X combined with Superman and the two bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki would not even be there because Einstein wouldn`t have come to America to collaborate on the Manhattan project, so nobody would accuse USA of terrorism propelled by a state.
But I cannot change history, and that makes me emit a wan little smile that I save for the moments when my broken spine remembers how it became that way. I want to forget the Korean War and MacArthur offering ugly Chian Kai Scheck to go and kick Mao out of China(the reason why Truman had him brought back home in disgrace so he wouldn`t continue dreaming about creating World War III), I would have let George Patton live and not simulate an accident to get rid of him, I would have let poor Dwight Eisenhower marry his driver Kay Summersby even if Mamie had kittens and Marshall would howl that he was going to make I Like Ike`s life a living hell, maybe thus he wouldn`t have arrived at the White House with such a frown and gotten all the poor squirrels removed from his golf course.I would drive the shadow on 9-11 out of existence and never have allowed troops to kill children or allow young soldiers to die in Irak. But even though I would love playing god, I am not even acquainted with what a deity would do.
This fourth of July is one hour away from ending. Fireworks, fireflies for a celebration. The birth of a nation is always bloody,but at the end there is the newborn baby. As Indira Gandhi said once, let`s not remember the labor pains with a sad expression, smile to show how you survived and how proud you are.
As a historian, I won`t emit any judgement. I just went hopscotching through the album of moments of this nation. One shining bit here, another one there, taking you with me, you who lives in my mind all the time, wherever I go.You were right, comrade. I found no bile in me. Blood, sweat, tears, smiles and sighs. Even laughter, like when Lincoln had to turn down King Mongkut of Siam`s elephants so he could help the war effort of the Union during the Civil War. It is only when the United States finally follows the words of Lincoln when he spoke of a government for the people by the people, true greatness in all senses will have been achieved.

Music

July Third, 9th Entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
A Little Night Music

Birth
1423 Louis XI king of France (1461-83) the ugly Spider King
1883 Franz Kafka Czech, author (Metamorphosis, Trial, Amerika)I would enjoy turning into a bug, Frank, but I already have my own short story about a metamorphosis of a chap into a black cat
1567 Samuel de Champlain French explorer (Lake Champlain)and founder of Quebec
death
1971 Jim Morrison rocker (Doors), dies of heart failure in Parism gets buried at the famous Père Lachaise cemetery
Algeria : Independence Day (1962) Finally alter so much bloodshed to get rid of France


I hummed my first tune in my crib before I learned to walk. I still sing when my students have begun a test. Is it that I envy Nero, eating grapes and playing the lyre while Rome burned? Stubborn, headstrong, dark little me. I have always sang .Of course as a baby my first hummed tune was logically something from Tchaikovsky`s Nutcracker Suite. ;y exquisite aboriginal mother believed that placing me on the crib or sofa to listen to classical music was a very healthy custom,. I agree with her even to this day. As a toddler, I broke everything. The only thing to quiet me down was music. Yes, just like good old Orpheus in Greek mythology, called upon to quiet the beasts. My nose drips, my eyes are red but I happily sing along with that woman I adore, Barbra Streisand, Jewish and tenacious like me, and I bawl I am a woman in love and I`d do anything to get you into my world and hold you within. My neighbors want me to shut up. I have no sore throat, strange flu that I have. Trust me to do things My Way,as that blue-eyed hunk of American beefcake Frank Sinatra sang. So I continue following the Divine Barbra.
I feel like a note that she is going to hit with that mellifluous voice. Music. Prince Korkut of the Osmanlis said that angels had their own language, but they were good teachers so they gave music to humans. Korkut himself was a great composer and luthier. I am a woman in love with music. A musician still lives inside this body, beneath the stars in my eyes as I am as of today and the stars on my epaulets that sometimes twinkle but weigh too much. Sometimes my long fingers still miss the other keyboard, the one belonging to the piano.
It`s my mom`s fault. She was musically gifted. She played the guitar and mandolin. Anything from Chilean cuecas to Vivaldi`s concerto for lute. She was also an Orpheus for me, but she had to make a living along with my dad, cooking as our foremost chef, so she would put me on an easy chair and listen to anything from Francois Couperin to Manuel de Falla and his Amor brujo.. Along with my reddish cat Torta when I already had her. Antonio Vivaldi was my healer, and still is. Even colic is cured by his music for me. Tchaikovsky-whom I loved even more after I found out he had been gay and afraid to leave the closet-the perfect Mozart, jingly Praetorius from the Renaissance, Schubert-who being so ugly and fat like a pig, could produce such majestic and otherworldly beauty in his Unfinished Symphony just because he was infatuated with a whore. I also dreamed with Anton Dvorak the Bohemian who loved trains and was the founder of the New York Conservatory, Verdi, who was also such a great nationalist and did his bit for the unification of La Bella Italia, Puccini with his Madame Butterfly which still makes me get goosebumps when I hear it. Torta and I would sit together amiably and drool. Nobody could move us. Our friendship and cat and slave began under the warm umbrella of Ravel`s Alborada del Gracioso, expanded with Sir Edward Elgar`s Pomp and Circumstances March ·1 (the one used for the Commencement ceremony when I graduated fro high school) and grew to proportions so big it could not fit in the whole Rite of Spring by big-mouthed Stravinsky. Put together with Beethoven`s Coriolanus Overture. I listen to music while I expect the fever to go down, right now, and I feel instantly better. My mood is between happy and tired, but a gentle weariness. It is more like Mozart`s A Little Night Music. I haven`t lost appetite, I feel satisfied and placid. Loved. Music, among other things, seem to be helping me. I unceremoniously blow my nose and to me it sounds like Haydn`s Trumpet Concerto. But I wouldn`t mind listening to the Adagio from the Concerto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra by my long-dead idol Joaquìn Rodrigo or Victor Jara`s famous Pimiento(composed before Pinochet had him assassinated after the 1973 Chilean coup). II had the incredible honor of meeting Joaquìn Rodrigo when I went to Spain in the early eighties. But right now Billy Joel is singing his Uptown Girl, before those awful Irish lads from Westlife messed it up.
Uptown girl. Can a colonel be anyone`s uptown girl? Was I that for the Union on Nicaraguan Musicians when dark, green eyed Alcibiades, a popular musician, arrived at my doorstep to ask for a picture and my biography in order to place me in the Pyramid of Great Composers that his organization has in the huge John Paul II Square by Lake Xolotlàn in Managua? How did I merit that honor, to be next to our Divine Leper Josè de la Cruz Mena, author of such sublime waltzes like Loves of Abraham or Ruins? Next to the co-creator of the son nica Camilo Zapata(who is still alive, with Alzheimer but still trying to get fresh with teenagers), or Justo Santos, author of La Mora Limpia(our second national anthem for Nicaragua)? I am there, in that small Hall of Musical Fame,with windswept hair, looking more like a cover girl than a serious composer. Did the soundtracks for TV dramas such Antheo, Those Years we left Behind, The Rose, Not all that shines Is Gold, This Man from this Land, Breaking Silence and others get me there? I still find those scores melodious, sweet ,cloying but derivative. I never had my own seal as a composer. Smacked of Vivaldi, Bocherini , Giuliani or Chopin. Nothing wrong with those composers. Only that I am not a single one of them. But I was paid for those scores. They are recorded. I was the first timpanist of the National Orchestra before I went to study in France. People, I still compose but never write it on the pentagram anymore. I can still play the piano, even after I fractured both wrists in 1986. But that keyboard never gave me the satisfaction, the adrenalin, the joy that a computer keyboard gives me as a writer.
Those who view me only as a dark ceramic doll dressed in camouflage or a sex object which must wait barefoot, naked and panting to just expecting summons to make noises will never understand me. How could I compose and abandon it? Sometimes you have to give up many things you are in order to become what you really want to be. Once I told a chap in France I wasn`t leaving him for another man, but for another woman. He was puzzled and never understood that I had to leave him in order to become the woman I am now. Every time you go away you take a piece of me, bawls out Jonh Paul Young in his hit. Do I do that to you? I don`t mean to. I never go from you, I always stay and leave my heart in your hands. Make music from it. But then again, being Orpheus is so complicated.
My best friend would call me to sing for him when he was utterly depressed, fat wax.-like tears rolling down his pale cheeks. You are Orpheus and I your beast, he would sigh. That was when I thanked my old teachers, the Spanish Serra, Julio Max Blanco, Salvador Cardenal, et al because they taught me music. Getting Oscar to smile was the best attempt to be made, and I always managed to wring at least a grin from him. He was the one who once told me I would find my own little drop of shining napalm falling from the corner of an angel `s eye. Did he ever realize what a prophet he had become? Now that I see he had the power of prediction I cannot even tell him because he has been dead for almost 12 years.
Music. This whole piece has been prompted by music. My photographic memory has thousands of scores memorized, from Franz Von Suppès Light Cavalry Overture to Bob Marley`s Redemption Songs, Richard Strauss`fabulous Don Juan tone poem lying next to Ananda Shankar`s Cyrus or Barry Manilow`s soppy I can`t Smile Without You, not forgetting Leroy Anderson`s Blue Tango and never forgetting that Karen Carpenter before dying of anorexia nervosa trilled that I Know I Need to be In Love…
because the singing Egyptian goddess of song Om Khaltoum had sung about something similar, making everyone shiver with delight and the sparrow of Paris Edith Piaf made my dad tremble with desire and joy when she sang La Vie en Rose. I thank life that it gave us Neil Diamond`s Song Sung Blue as well as Spanish Francisco Tàrrega`s Capriccio Arabe
Music will never erase the horrors of World war II or the thousands of wars humans had had the bad sense to fight, including the massacre that was perpetuated by people like Francois Mitterand in Algeria until these brave people finally kicked the Frenchies out. But my Jewish self dances when I hear Hava Naguila or the theme from Schindler`s List or the one by Jerry Goldsmith for Exodus. My mother somehow mastered the sirtaki theme by Mikis Theodorakis that served as leit motif through the film Zorba the Greek, and Prince Korkut`s religious music for the dancing dervishes still fascinates me although it was stolen by a white woman to recycle it in the awful film version of Eyes Wide Shut. Silvio Rodriguez`s Madre from the New Cuban troubadours will always be in the same pocket of my military garb that I keep Mexican Juan Pablo Moncayòs Huapango or Anton Dvorak `s Humoresque, or Pachelbel`s Canon or Emerson, Lake and Palmer`s wonderful version of Modeste Mussorgsky`s Pictures at an Exhibition. Many of my short stories have had a musical inspiration. Music keeps me company while I write this humble offering for you to read tomorrow while you imagine that distances can be snuffed out by a simple wave of Zubin Mehta`s baton conducting Brahms` Academic Festival Overture or the drums in Baltimore`s Tarzan Boy hit. I look forward to the day when, wearing a cat as an ornament on my lap, I look into your eyes and smile while I sing something even though I know my voice is not Plàcido Domingo`s. Will I ever hear The Captain of her Heart by Double in the same room as you, my reader, or will Alan Parson`s Time tell me it was all simply a question of days, or months for us to listen to music together?
Music simple unlocks the floodgates of dreams and rises imagination into action, an artilleried helicopter like my Vercingètorix 325 ready to go on mission to blue pools of harmony and mountain landscapes of melody. Music gives us back the sovereignty of our expectations.
That is why, the perfect water for the seed of hope, will always be a song or a symphony.

SHOCK

8th entry to the Colonel´s Scrapbook
born today
1877 Hermann Hesse Switzerland, novelist/poet (Steppenwolf, Siddharta , Nobel 1946)liked Siddhartha much better. 1884 Dr Otto Bohm Prussia, scientist (helped create England´s Radar based on the studies made by Italian priest Lázaro Spallanzanni on the flight of bats)
1925 Patrice Lumumba patriot from Zaire, peerless revolutionary revolutionary, who would end up tortured by the CIA

Deaths
1566 Jewish doctor and seer Michel de Nostradamus, French astrologer dies exactly as he predicted in Salon
1882 James Garfield assassinated by "job-seeker" months after his wife accused him of harbouring a sinful and bottomless passion for another lady1961 Ernest Hemingway finally shot himself to death in Ketchum ,Idaho. Bullet through his head. Wasn´t his first attempt, once he was drunk he wished to walk into a running turbine. Feel sorry for his cats, though.

Shock. The word has electricity.
Try hitting your elbow against a sharp object. There it goes. Not only pain, hissing sensation that makes you overvalue your skin. Or undervalue your mortality. No eternity is worth it. The sweat trickles furiously down your back. Adrenalin, that powerful hormone which is underestimated as a powerfully addictive drug, surges through your bloodstream and creates delicious havoc. Every nerve becomes wonderfully alive. Watch out. You can get addicted to it.
Have you ever been really scared? So scared you could die, your heart freezes in your chest. Spooks ,ghosts, goblins anyone? Isn´t it funny that someone like me, raised on the fat and warm teat of Marxist doctrine, can be a lightning rod to scary, eerie experiences?
I, who can never believe in anything, chased by spectres? Come off it. I have seen war. Remember once I told you I had yarned with a dead guy? In the 1980s.
Okay let me take your big hand and wrap my bony hand around yours. Your touch is comforting, as I imagined it would be. Let me tell you ghost stories that really happened.
1963.Downtown Managua, the posh quarter of San Antonio. My grandmother´s enormous two-story townhouse. I am finished with my nap. The wind howls. I am in the big bedroom, on the second floor, that has the corner balcony. My eyes are fuzzy. I am little more than a toddler, but I can already read and write. There was a thunderstorm brewing.
Rain had begun. The sky was a deep grayish blue. The wind was blowing. I got out of the room and went into the big hall,looking for the staircase.there was an inner balcony at the entrance of the attic room. You could see the angry sky,and there was a multiple coat hanger at the entrance of the attic. The curtains were flapping.I am breaking into goosebumps as I tell you this, my pal. Hold my hand tightly,pleae.I am supposed to be fearless, dauntless. I have been condecorated, remember the jingle of my medals. I need you to remind me that they exist. That they were laid on my chest. There were two raincoats, and black hat and a sweater hanging there. The staircase began just at the entrance to the attic So down I went slowly. I was getting scared.My heart was pounding. The wind got wilder. Suddenly, the multiple coat hanger tipped,and almost fell on me,and one of the raincoats did smother my face. I couldn`t get rid of the garment, and I felt something gripping my neck. I was choking but I didn`t find my voice. The raincoat tangled fiercely around me.I rolled down the steps and landed at the beginning of the huge marble staircase,in the dining room. My grandmother ran to pick me up. I was crying I can`t hold back the tears as I write this, and I am so embarrassed that you should see me cry. Death looked into my eyes, but I ran away from it. My grandmother picked me up into her soft lap, but then she let me go suddenly with a jolt. Around my neck, after she removed the tangled raincoat, was a welt. A huge hand had left its imprint in deep red around my small neck. I was taken to the doctor. He believed it was a case of child abuse. That is so common in our country. People still hit children here. But in my case I had not been almost strangled by anything from this world. With the passing of time I wrote a short story about it and published it in a book of 13 short horror tales. I called it The Coat Hanger and painter Emilio Gonzàlez made a beautiful illustration for it. Every time I read it in public people would start fidgeting. I still have no explanation for that.
As I lack explanation for other strange things that have happened to me. Is that why I became a terror short story writer? When I went to study college in France, my first year was spent in Strasbourg, at 300 kilometers away from Paris. I used to take lessons with a burly drunkard who happened to be a great percussionist, Jean Batigne. He taught at he regional Conservatoire, and he become sufficiently enthusiastic about my tympany and piano playing that he decided to take me to a building called Le Maillon, located in Hautepierre, the suburbs of the city. There the famous and noisy ensemble named Les Percussions de Strasbourg used to rehearse. One day they were practicing the peerless Music for Percussions, Strings and Celesta by Hungarian composer and pianist Bèla Bartòk. They had been practicing all afternoon, so they decided to take a break. I decided to stay inside. It was really cold. I wanted warmth. I sat at the piano and started to ply. Not anything from the piece they were playing, but some small piano pieces by the same Bartòk, specifically from Mikrokosmos. I was getting carried away by the music.I have always admired Bartòk`s music. I was starting to sweat. Suddenly I felt a cold hand caressing my nape, but I continued. Then I turned around and saw him as he must have been when he fell in love with his first wife Martha Ziegler. Bartòk. As real and tangible as your hand gripping mine.. Pure human flesh. I fainted. Seconds afterwards I regained consciousness and I found myself on the floor under the piano seat. I just got up and ran like crazy outside.
My teacher Batigne was alarmed. He had never seen me thus. He just plunked me into his old car-his bagnole.and took me to the hospital. After being checked by a general practitioner, I got sent home. But he wouldn`t trust me to be left alone. He took me to his apartment, where he had a pair of caged blackbirds who instead of warbling or singing just said boing boing. I just glared at the birds while Batigne`s wife gave me some hot tea. That night I could barely sleep. When dawn finally came, I got up to get a shower. On the mirror of the cabinet was scribbled in soap. Vege(Hungarian for the end,) Useless to say I screamed for some minutes until the concierge came in to calm me. Was it my musical version of a delibab, those mirages that appear on the Hungarian plains during nights when the moon has a halo around it?
Could things like this drive someone like Hemingway to put a bullet into his head at last? Did the bullet instantly kill all the memories he had of his beloved cats? If Nostradamus were on hand, or I were back in France, fleeing from the crass and grotesque advances made by a bearded Eastern version of the monster in the Castle, Bluebeard, the wife killer, would he have something to explain for all this?
Fear. It is uncontrollable. I have felt it tonight, looking into the crazed eyes of a stranger trying to grip at the soul I am not sure I have. Never the intense passion for your own survival that I had on the battlefield. There you are afraid of tangible, touchable, concrete stuff. A bullet, a booby trap-the helicopter being hit. But don`t ever let longing become a formula with fear. It rips you heart out like the scene in Francis Ford Coppola`s flick titled Mary Shelley`s Frankenstein. Remember when Robert De Niro playing the monster pounces on Elizabeth.being played by Helena Bonham Carter-who is writhing with sensuality on her marriage bed, still a virgin after she has wed the doctor, and DR. Frankenstein helplessly watches as his creation rips the beating heart out of his bride? Blood splashes,gushes out of the torn organ. I have felt that. It is to never be forgotten.
Stephen King may tell you in any bestseller he is about to publish that this fear has no bounds. I felt it in 1999.
Already married for 12 years, my daughter for whom I would kill any molester who dares approach her, was already a preteenager. It was Valentine`s Day. My spouse and I were having lunch with her at home. I placed their gifts on the table beside their plates. Not only should couples salute their love-even if it is a lion figment of our cat imagination- but also remind their kids how much in love they are with them. My daughter opened her gift and was delighted. My husband was reluctant to touch his. Bad omen. He cleared his throat, as when he is going to let out a big bullfrog of a lie-and said he had not gone to pick up my gift, so I should expect it when I came back home from my job teaching English grammar at the same posh but useless school where I had graduated from in 1978. I smiled and bit back my tears. I was profoundly humiliated. I remembered my parents and how my dad would give Mom and I thirteen red long-stemmed roses on Valentine`s Day. I thanked him warmly, got up from the table,got ready to go and left. I was fuming.
When I got to the school, the teenagers I had in the afternoon course had prepared a little Valentine`s party. A chocolate cake with cherries, soda, ice cream and chocolate kisses. At least they had a heart. Ricardo, one of my pet students, overturned a glass of soda on my skirt and I had to go three doors away from our classroom to the bathroom to get the garment soaped,rinsed and dried with the electrical hand drier. I had just finished that when I was walking down the hall, and I saw the figure of a young soldier coming towards me. He was wearing an old World War II uniform, the helmet called poilu, and he had a bouquet of roses over his left forearm. As he approached, I saw his greenblue eyes, warm smile and red hair. He looked like a very young man. I was about one foot away from him when he made the gesture of handing me the roses. Then he disappeared into thin air. I shivered and ran back to my classroom. When I got there, my students were agitated, They asked me if the soldier had found me, and Ricardo recriminated me that he was aware that was not my husband. They had all seen him. Later on, one of the charwomen, Paya, who worked at the school as part of the cleaning squad, told me she had seen a handsome soldier come in, he had even asked where he could find me. Later on, the general bookkeeper of the school came up to my classroom, where I was already teaching the evening students, and told me a military man had sought me out at the administration office. Collective hysteria. They had all seen him.
When I got home I was sure it had been my dad. My husband was waiting with a gift. He took my daughter and I to dinner at a fried chicken outlet(I hate chicken). There I told him about the vision, and that I was sure it had been my dad who was still the only perfect man for me. He smiled wryly. When we got home, he showed me on the kitchen pantry the red roses that had arrived for me at about 5 pm when I was still teaching. They had a card. Frtom the man who will never stop loving you.
I called the flower shop after I read the card with its seal. The flowers had been bought with a credit card, by a Bernard Levallois Lenoury. My own dad, dead for ten years since he had died in a plane crash. Can love be so strong as to go across the Great Divide? Or was it just a compensation, in order to feel loved. The flowers took a long time in wilting. I still keep one of them among the pages of a book by Guillaume D`Aquitaine. But don`t tell anyone, dearest heart. Things which pant a seed of fear in your brain must be left there, alone,in peace. As Stephen King once said, in his book Pet Sematary, each one tends to his garden and sows what he can. The soil of a man`s heart is stonier than anything else. But it can still sprout roses, in a strange amalgam of longing as only distance and time can melt together.

.

WAR

7th entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook,July 1st.

These wonderful ladies were born on a day like today:
1804 George Sand France, novelist (Valentine, Le Figaro)The feminist who wore pants when jeans weren`t even created yet by Levì Strauss, smoked cigars like my Daddy did, and didn`t let weak and oversugary Chopin cough out his lungs on top of her. For the sake of Looooove. Hail, Madame!

1908 Estee Lauder CEO (Estee Lauder's cosmetics),thanks for your Aliage, which I wore as an adolescent although my mom used to sayis was as strong as insecticide


And in events we have that
1535 Sir Thomas More went on trial in England charged with treason.How could a guy as wise enough to write Utopia ever get enmeshed in a marital fight and lose his head over Henry VIII`s amorous quirks?

1690 Army of England's Protestant King William III defeats Roman Catholic King James II in Battle of the Boyne in Ireland (Now celebrated on July 12 as "The Battle of the Orange" )Boing boing went James when he found out the only thing he had to do was go to France as an exile to live under King Louis XIVth`s mercy.

1823 United Provinces of Central America gain independence from Mexico, something we were dumb enough to do just after having our Declaration of Independence signed on September 15th 1821.

1863 Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; Lee's northward advance is finally halted, This was happening during the only war the Americans have had to deal with on their own territory. Now they export wars, computers, cars, and nasty candy with aspartame.

As I unwrap my long silk scarf from around my neck, something I wear even with military uniform,remembering that Isadora Duncan, the mother of contemporary dance, was strangled when her own scarf got caught in the wheels of the car she was riding, I wonder why humans have lived at war for such a long time. It may seem funny that a military asks this question, because it may be like an oxymoron to call someone a pacifist colonel. Am I strangling myself with the term? My war experiences match with the lyrics that Boy George and his Culture club sang in the 80s about war being stupid. My dad was a veteran of World War II. He still had his tattoo from Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was taken after he got captured on June 9th in his native Normandie, while he was doing what kings do when they are alone. He had been on D Day at age 24,taken along by General Eisenhower during Operation Overlord, along with many others who joined the Free French Forces under General Charles De Gaulle. Somehow he survived almost one year in Auschwitz, first being sodomized by a sadistic gay nazi officer who found his weightlifting champion`s body so tempting, then surviving in the kitche when he was befriended by a young German officer, Hans Dietrich(no relation to the irresistible Blue Angel Marlene Dietrich.) After his experience and that of my uncles and aunts who participated as soldiers, war correspondents or nurses in WWII, I should have known better, right? Wrong. My own father was the one to blame, and I don`t say this as a recrimination. As soon as a new war flick was announced on the pages of any newspaper, my dad was ready to take me to see it. I grew up watching war films from the moment I could walk, being a strangely silent toddler who could read and write from age three, like our own bard Rubèn Darìo.
I learned to whistle with the tune from Bridge Over River Kwai, cried when I saw a documentary about the death of admiral Isoroku Yamamoto(the guy who attacked Pearl Harbor although at the beginning of the mission he was still reluctant to do it),laughed until my stomach hurt with The Dirty Dozen, jumped like a monkey with The Iron Cross(never forgot how handsome James Coburn looked there), shook with excitement with Oliver Stone`s Platoon, found John Wayne miscast in El Alamo although rather liked his performance in the Sands of Iwo Jima. I applauded Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now although I could never believe that the smell of napalm was the smell of victory, come on you guys, how many monkeys and squirrels and pigeons did that damned thing kill when Vietnam`s forests were destroyed…They were not to blame for the utter stupidity and criminal instincts of man.
Am I to blame that when I was half crippled in 2003,wracked with my neuropathies from diabetes as a bonus, and being called “a morsel of beautiful but useless meat”, I would take a broomstick without the bushy sweeping part, pile up all my pillows in bed and fuse them into a barricade, and watch the flicks on cable TV while I shot with the broomstick? My husband never saw that, he was teaching Spanish n to a nice Korean kid, and I was alone-not quite alone but with all my cats-in bed, firing at all my frustrations and pains. That was part of my rehabilitation process. If I could crawl and kill those Nazis in the movies I saw, I would walk again against all predictions any doctor in chicanery could emit about my possibilities to get back on my feet. War flicks definitely do help, ladies and gentlemen. Take my word for it. If there were a territorial war over my adored San Juan River because the Costa Ricans want to gobble it up, I would be the first to go and start the shooting. I would die, or kill, for the sovereignty of my homeland.
Once I told a guy who interviewed me about the award given to my short story M.I.A.(Missing in Action) that I believed in what Ho Chi Mihn said that we have the right to live in peace although it may need that we go to war to get it. Look at so many wars over territories. Independence wars. I remember that George Sand, the feminist writer that had on her birth certificate the name Aurore instead of her famous pen name, that a soldier never comes back with his heart intact because he left tears in the battlefield. She was wise enough to never let her lover, the composer Frederic Chopin, strangle her inspiration, and she was a bit ashamed of his cowardice because his way of being patriotic about his native Poland was by staying away from his country and running away from anything having to do with the military. Cheap way of being a patriot, rather sentimental, but too easy. There were even women soldiers during the American Civil War, by the way the only one that the Americans have had to fight in their own territory(and believe me they are still traumatized by its ghastly memory). Robert E. Lee, considered by many one of the greatest generals in history(although he fought on the wrong side) would have never let a woman shed her petticoats in order to fight. My grandmother would have agreed with General Lee, for she refused to talk to me when I wore my military uniform. Ladies didn`t go to war.
One curious thing happened to me, and the journalist who had an interview with me over the award for my story was shocked when I said it. I felt such compassion for all the poor creatures, horses, dogs, whatever, who died as a consequence of the bloody conflict that we lived in Nicaragua during the eighties. Seeing a dead sloth in Jalapa set me crying all the way back on the helicopter ride to Managua. We were carrying two dead soldiers, one had stepped on a booby trap and there were several parts of his body missing. I felt sorry for his parents, his family, all the people who loved him. They would have to survive this awful experience of losing a loved one.
he had been only 2 weeks away from being discharged from his military service
which would ordinarily last 2 years. I cried all the way back to Managua. I couldn`t get the sight of the dead sloth and her baby sloth too, lying beneath a tree. Animals don`t have to pay for our stupidity as humanunkind. Nevertheless, since the dawn of history ,we have been mean and ruthless enough to include them in our war agendas. Horses, oxes, donkeys ,camels, elephants, war dogs(only to be killed or left behind when the conflict was over), even cats like Simon of the Amethyst who kept the warboat free of mice while his officers tried to get out of reach from Mao, the heroic messenger pigeons that were used when Napoleon III(who was a stupid nephew of the Petit Gèneral and lacked his drive, charm or war genius)lost his throne leaving the sieged Paris during the Franco-Prusssian War in 1871. Messenger pigeons were to fly during World War I and World War II, many times dying while in service. The animals have never asked to be part of the carnage of war. They aren`t as stupid as we are.
Men go to war because their ambitions and thirst-lust –for power drives them nuts. Maybe that is why all those unknown soldiers failed to elicit anything more than fleeting compassion from me. Of course,there were some exceptions.
The name of Rubendarìo Ramirez comes instantly to my mind and a quiver of scorpion`s poison invades the heart I will never confess to having. He was green eyed, and so young, and I was on mission in La Penca,southern part of Nicaragua,an enormous tropical jungle. We were back in the small town of San Carlos, and we had to stay there overnight so the following morning the chopper would take us back to Managua. Rubendarìo was lying against some boulders and sandbags. He had an internal hemorrhage and I suspect one of his lungs was already useless. I was unable to sleep in the barracks, it was sweltering hot and the moon was like the big round wheel of cheese my white mice used to dream about in their pink cage. We started chatting. He asked me to never stop speaking to him or he would die. We continued yarning until everyone was asleep. I had never met anyone like him. He told me that kismet had destined him to be something important for me. But between 4 and 5 am, I was so weary I dozed off.
That did the trick.When the helicopter came, he didn’t get in on his own.He was unceremoniously put in a plastic bag and thrown inside. I felt guilty.I had fallen asleep. I didn`t cry this time like when I saw mother and baby sloth dead. I just got off the helicopter upon arriving in Managua and insisted that I take his body to the morgue,and then call his mother. It wasn`t until I saw him lying on the slab,naked, that I could see his wounds. But the forensic doctor said he had been dead since 8 o `clock due to the lividity. Lividity is the stagnant blood that accumulates in some part of the corpse once the blood has stopped being pumped. I told the doctor that was not possible because I had been chatting with him all night. I refused to cry. When I went to his home, at the address he had given me, I told his mother all about it. It was then that I started crying. I asked to see the two cats he had, and couldn`t stop crying.
I had been yarning with a dead man. Ever since I have asked myself how much do medical doctors know about life or death or both.
My war experiences left a permanent footprint on the map of my psyche. Every night I have a double séance of nightmares, no matter if I eat a lot for dinner or not. Many of my nightmares have become successful short tales. They have brought extra dollars for the writer I am now. I will continue having nightmares as long as I live. And if there is life after death, which I doubt, I might be having nightmares when my heart is finally being extricated from my chest to be thrown into the San Juan River.
Yes, folks war Is stupid and ruthless. When asked if I would take any part of my life history and cut it from my own biography, I wouldn`t change anything. Having survived war, I know how dear my own inner peace and my life as a war veteran is at least to me. I would say to my beloved Uncle Ho of Vietnam, yes Unk, I have gained my right to live in peace under this sun, even if I had to go to war and get shot, shrapnelled, broken, bled and having seen the mysterious,iridescent profile of death dancing upon my horizon.