Man with a Gun

The man wore a gun, and really, it was far too early in the morning to deal with something like that. My breakfast coffee shop, 6:45 a.m., and the guy is not a cop. I am waiting to order my bagel and three shots of espresso. The man is directly in front of me. There is a handgun in a holster on his belt, and he is fingering the weapon as if it were a religious amulet. He is definitely neither an enforcer of the law, nor a dentist from Minnesota in search of a tame lion; he’s just a slightly overweight guy with a gun, really big feet, and a vacuous gaze.

The diminutive Ethiopian lady who generally mans (womans?) the cash register is purely nervous. It’s obvious that she does not want to wait on him, but she has no choice. Frankly, I am nervous too. But I’m curious as well.

I want to ask him, What exactly do you think you may have to defend yourself against this morning? A delinquent bagel attack? A coffee-maker running amok? Or maybe my friend Owen who’s here every day by eight a.m. and could be said to lack social graces.

It is legal to openly carry a weapon in Virginia. You do not need a license or training, though a nominal background check is necessary to purchase a handgun.  Technically, you can’t be a former convict and own a gun.

There’s a line forming behind me. I remember a few years ago going to a take-out deli with an Afro-American friend. We were waiting to place our orders when two young white guys came in, both with pistols on their hips. They were aggressively loud and boisterous, almost as if challenging the other clients to complain. My friend whispered to me, “I’m outta here. If they start shooting, you know who they’re gonna shoot first.”  He left quietly.

This morning I check my feelings. I’m not really scared, after all, but I’m somewhat embarrassed to witness this display of… what? What does a man with an openly carried firearm in a public place want to prove? I doubt he’s thinking of the Second Amendment. Does he feel threatened?  It’s really tempting to equate gun to manhood, and I struggle not to. The man is wearing a wedding ring. Does he keep his gun under his pillow and what does his spouse think of this? Okay, I’m going a little overboard here.

I’m reminded of bikers with open mufflers. The noise they make bothers everyone else. They basically impose themselves on their surroundings. It’s sort of the same thing as a child throwing a tantrum in a movie house; it ruins the film for everybody else. The gun guy is ruining my breakfast, and, simply by looking around, I can tell he’s causing consternation. I begin to suspect that this maybe what it’s all about—being noticed.

Here’s what’s interesting.  In no way does this man’s presence make me feel safer. He’s not a solution to the crime problem, he’s an accessory.  If someone, at that very moment, had chosen to rob the coffee shop at gunpoint, I would have felt more endangered with two guns in the room than with one. I don’t want to be in the middle of shoot-out between a criminal and a self-appointed enforcer of the law. And I’m pretty sure that even the coffee shop owner would prefer handing over the breakfast money than having a replay of the OK Corral in his space.

A man with a gun in a small town not ten miles away from the Nation’s Capital is unusual enough that the other clients are looking at each other. Some shrug. A young couple turns around and exits. A mother with two small kids keeps them close by.

The guy leaves. I’m sure he’s aware of the seism he caused and now I suspect this short appearance made his day.

The National Rifle Association axiom that Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People does not make me feel better at all.

My Father--Part 2

There are three mysteries surrounding my late father’s life.

The first is what he was doing in the United States in 1943. He apparently came to America with a group of French pilots, possibly to translate as they trained at an airfield in South Carolina. I find this mundane possibility farfetched. I think he accompanied them for another purpose, possibly secret or clandestine, but I don’t know what that might have been.

The second is why he and his family had a falling out. It happened before I was born, and when, in my late teens, I sought an explanation, he merely said, “They didn’t act right towards me.” And that was that. Nor did my mother have a clue, which was surprising. She thrived on information and somehow not being privy to such an important event in her husband’s life must have gnawed at her.

The third mystery is the strangest of all.

One night I returned from a date to find my mother upstairs and my father on the landing below. They were yelling at each other, the only time I ever witnessed such a thing. I was staying out of the line of fire and crossing the living room when my father shouted up at her, “I should have stayed married to my first wife!”  Then he stormed out.

The next morning dawned as if nothing had happened. He went to work downtown, she busied herself at home. Later that evening, they avoided each other eyes. Dinner was an unusually quiet meal, no gossip or report on the events of the day. My mother did not bustle noisily as she generally did when they’d had an argument and she wanted it known that this wasn’t the end of it. After an uncomfortable silence, I asked, “So what was that about last night?” They both answered, “Rien du tout,” in unison. “Nothing at all.”

I forgot about it. There were more important things to attend to, including the suspicion that my very best friend was secretly sleeping with my girlfriend.

Decades later, though, when my father was slipping in and out of dementia, I asked him about it. He was fully lucid that particular morning and he denied ever having said—much less shouted—anything about a spouse before my mother. But I saw something in his face, a fleeting and subtle change that told me otherwise. It was tempting to belabor the issue. Did I have siblings other than my two half-sisters from my mother’s first union? In my head, I ran through the full complement of journalism school questions—who and when and why and where and how! But then it struck me that if he’d wanted to tell me about some details of his early life, he would have done so. In this case, he chose not to, and that certainly was his right. I once asked my sisters about it, and neither had anything to offer. And so my father took these three secrets, and possibly many more, to his grave.

I have no contacts with my father’s family.

Sagnier is a relatively unusual name. It means salt gatherer, so on the paternal side I can safely abandon any hope of finding a link to wealth or royalty. There are Sagnier’s in Spain, and there’s a pretty strong likelihood that I’m related to the French actress Ludivine Sagnier, whom I think may be a second cousin.  

There are thirty Google pages comprising 283 entries relating to the name Sagnier. Most of them are devoted to Ludivine who is particularly well-known for a nude scene in the movie Swimming Pool. There are also architects, scientists, photographers, a champion stunt motorcyclist, and the mayor of a medium-sized town in France.

In the United States, there’s me, my ex-wife Mai, who chose to keep her married name, and Christine M. Sagnier who lives in Plainsboro, New Jersey.

But who knows. There might be a whole bunch of other Sagniers somewhere from my father’s first marriage. I’ll never know, and I’m fine with that.

My Father--Part I

I was sorting through a sheaf of old papers I found in the back of a desk drawer when an envelope full of old photographs fell to the floor.

There were shots of my parents in the South of France with friends I vaguely recognized, and four photos of my father and me. These were taken sometimes in the early 70s in front of the house my then-wife and I had bought for a pittance in what was considered a dangerous neighborhood in Washington, DC.

We are standing on the sidewalk. I am impossibly thin and longhaired. My father wears a sly grin, as if he’s just told a really bad and slightly off-color joke, or perhaps put one over on my mother when she wasn’t looking.  The picture made me smile.

My father was a good man. Born in London of French and British parents in the first decade of the 20th century, he had hoped to become an architect and studied in Versailles. When World War II broke out, he was in the West Coast of the US, employed as the traveling secretary to a British Lord. He could have avoided military service but chose instead to sail from the Panama Canal to Portugal, and then to walk from Portugal to Le Touquet, a town on the French side of the English Channel. He then ‘borrowed’ a small boat and sailed it to England.

His 1000-kilometer trek took him through occupied France. He hid from the Germans during the day and walked at night. Various underground resistance groups helped him along, supplying clothing, food, money, and fake identification papers.

In England he joined the Free French, the breakaway military force that answered Charles de Gaulle’s call for the French to keep fighting even though their government had capitulated to the Germans. He was infiltrated back into France to run a clandestine mobile radio station that re-broadcast news from the Voice of America and BBC to a populace that secretly listened in hushed tones.

At the end of the war, he met my mother, who was also with the Free French and serving in Algeria. They had a one-night stand and I was conceived in a US Army truck somewhere on the outskirts of Marseille.

My father did the right thing and married my mother. For a while, living in Paris, they had a radio show where he played a somewhat dumb American GI to her wily French demoiselle. It was a monster success and my parents became household names, albeit poorly paid ones.  When I was born, the station that aired the program was inundated with diapers, bibs, booties, tiny berets and an assortment of mostly hand-me-down baby clothes.

This was all well and fine except that my mother, still in the hospital recovering from my birth, demanded a ham and cheese omelet. This was post-war Paris; there was no ham, there was no cheese, there were no eggs. My father, in a rare show of intemperate behavior, found the hospital cook and forced him, at gunpoint, to raid his personal food supply. The cook fixed the omelet. My father took it to my mother’s hospital room. She ate it, though she complained it lacked salt.

They were both fired from the radio station the next day.

I know all this because, though my father never spoke of his war, he kept a series of journals that I still have. I also have the Legion of Honor awarded him by the French government, and his discharge papers, as well as a photograph of him and my mother, in uniform, standing amidst the bombed out ruins of a city that may have been Dresden.

Of the two, my mother was the creative one. She painted, wrote children’s books, acted in local theater, played the piano and the accordion. She was also a couturiere who wanted to rival Coco Chanel. My father catered to her needs. He repaired used sewing machines; he built frames for her paintings, and attended the endless play rehearsals. He edited her writings. He re-upholstered the tatty furniture she found in flea markets.

When the family came to the US many years after the war, only he spoke English, and so he found the house we would live in, and the car my mother learned to drive. He taught me my first words of English using a Bugs Bunny comic cook. He spent a lot of time soothing the ruffled feelings of my mother, who could not understand how a country could survive without decent cheese, baguettes and pâtés.

(End of Part I)

 

 

 

Going, Going, Gone

The murder of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe by a Minneapolis dentist brought to mind the disappearance of seemingly lesser beings. I am assuming no dentist from the Midwest or elsewhere is responsible, but I remain concerned by the vanishings.

This summer, for example, I have seen a grand total of one firefly. It was hovering in my front yard last evening blinking frantically at first, then with less and less ardor. It finally drifted away as fireflies do, and yes, I’ll admit it, this very small event saddened me.

Why are fireflies disappearing? According to Examiner.com, “Most researchers blame three main factors: Increased chemical use, development and light pollution… Signs indicate that light pollution as a major factor in the disappearance of fireflies all over the world. Human light pollution is believed to interrupt firefly flash patterns. Scientists have observed that fireflies get out of synch for a few minutes after a car’s headlights pass. Light from homes, cars, stores, and street lights may all make it difficult for fireflies to signal each other during mating—meaning fewer firefly larvae are born next season.”

The bees are going, as we all know, but no one had reported on the dearth of praying mantis. I haven’t seen a single one of the big insects this summer. Two years ago I found an injured mantis in my driveway and kept it alive in a terrarium through the winter and early spring. I released it after making sure the last frost had passed, and I assume it got somewhere safely. By the way, female mantis do not eat their husband’s head after mating, so it’s safe to come back in the next life as a male mantis without fear of decapitation. You might want to fear the pesticides, though. Chemicals used in ornamental gardens are fatal to both good and bad insects. Mantis are among the victims. And so, incidentally, are ladybugs, one of the more beneficial insects any yard can have, and monarch butterflies, which went from thousands to none in the space of two years.

Turtles and snakes? Not a one in my yard. Box turtles and black snakes were once common in my part of the country; a healthy rain brought out a number of the yellow-and-black-shelled reptiles that can live forty or more years. No more. Vanishing lands and water sources, cars and lawnmowers, have spelled death for this gentle species.

A couple of years ago, two small garden snakes got into my house. They were no longer than a foot and I deposited them back outdoors. The big snakes—rat snakes and black runners—have vanished. As developers take down trees and wild shrubs, the snakes lose their home environment as well as their sources of food. Once commonly seen sunning themselves on the old stone walls that border farmers’ fields, the snakes appear to have gone the way of the turtles.

And then there are the bats. I have a bat box behind my garage that used to house a small collection of these mammals. There are sixteen different bat species in Virginia, and I never could tell what kind was flitting around my yard, but I do know they are not there anymore. A fungus that has killed millions of bats in the past few years shows no signs of abating.  

What we do have, in droves, are rabbits.  I see one or two every day, and with the hare proliferation has come an increase in foxes. There are at least two red ones with burrows within a hundred yards of my house.  They’re curious and fearless and one, in particular, has several times challenged my cat. A mistake, that. I have a long-haired Burmese of advancing age who no longer knows what fear is. The fox yips, barks, makes strange coughing sounds and capers around my front lawn. The cat stares at it without much interest. Once there was an argument over the corpse of a small rabbit one or the other had slain. The car had it, the fox wanted it. The fox did not get it and the small corpse was deposited on the deck of my neighbors.  A gift, no doubt, since my neighbors are honorary cat parents and their yard is part of the cat’s territory. Tennyson was right—nature is red of tooth and claw.  

Oh, and we now have coyotes. I was surprised to see one near my Metro station. And bear. A black bear was spotted not three miles from my house. And there are reports that bobcats are making a return. So maybe all is not lost, but I do miss the turtles and snakes.

 

RIP Cedric

I’m not big on guns. I’m not big on hunting, either, so when I read a small item about a dentist killing a tame lion in Zimbabwe with a bow and arrow, I got pretty upset.

 
So let’s name names. The hunter—I use the term very loosely here—is Walter James Palmer, a Minneapolis dentist. The lion was a harmless 14-year-old beast named Cedric who lived in a protected habitat and was both well-known and well-loved by Zimbabweans. He was apparently drawn out of this place of safety just far enough so that Dr. Palmer could shoot it. After being informed that Cedric was essentially Zimbabwe’s totem animal, their bald eagle, so to speak. Dr. Palmer said he did not know Cedric was off-limits, which I guess makes it perfectly okay, and that he was sorry. Not sorry enough, I guess, since as of this morning, he has eluded the Zimbabwean authorities and his present whereabouts are unknown. The anti-poaching police are, pardon the expression, hunting for him. I imagine Dr. Palmer is also one of those worthies who pay a fortune to hunt and kill in game parks where animals are kept for that very purpose.

According to USA Today, Palmer paid more than $50,000 for the right to kill Cecil, a big cat well-known at the Hwange National Park, and that wore a GPS collar so his movements could be studied. Palmer and his guides strapped a dead gazelle to their Jeep and lured the lion out of the park’s boundaries. Palmer then shot him with a compound bow but failed to kill the animal. Eventually, Cedric was finished off with a gunshot, then skinned and beheaded. There have been allegations that the hunter and his guides attempted to destroy the animal’s GTPS collar.

The Minnesota dentist has a somewhat unsavory history. In 2006, he killed a black bear outside of a permitted area, then transported the carcass to a registration station where he claimed the bear had been killed legally. That little adventure led to a $3,000 fine. That same year, Dr. Palmer was accused of sexual harassment by his receptionist. A settlement of $127,000 followed, though the doctor admitted no wrongdoing.  Hunting of a different type, I guess. Palmer has also killed leopards, bighorn sheep, and at least one rhinoceros.

I have friends who hunt, and to maintain the friendship, this is a subject we no longer broach. Their opinions are as heartfelt as mine, and they truly believe they are conservationists, as well as sportsmen. I don’t. In fact, the last time I spoke about this blood sport with a hunting acquaintance, I suggested a real sportsman would challenge his prey on an even playing field, that is to say not from a tree stand, a moving vehicle—airplane or truck—or lurking behind a bush. To me, this is simply cowardly and lazy. I also proposed that instead of sophisticated hunting weapons, be they bows, rifles, shotguns or traps, the hunter be armed with a sharp stick of his own making, and large stones that he could hurl at the prey charged.

Take down a large animal that way and my opinion of your courage and sportsmanship might change.

 

 

The W & OD

I wanted to go to a softball game---men, women, kids, it didn’t really matter. There was no tangible reason, just a desire to see balls hit, people run, someone win and someone lose, all the while knowing it made no difference whatsoever.  At the end of the season, losers and winners alike will get trophies.

I took the W&OD trail, a nicely paved path that starts near the Potomac River and wanders 45 miles through Northern Virginia. I chose to walk from Falls Church where I live to Vienna, the next small town four miles away. I took five silver mints, a bottle of water, a small pack of salted almonds and two peaches. I tried to find someone to go with me but there were no takers. True, it was in the mi-80s and pretty humid, but the fact is that, with a few exceptions, my friends are wusses.

On weekends, the W&OD is normally crowded with joggers, walkers and cyclists. One of the things I noticed almost immediately is that nine out of ten people had earbuds on, and I wondered why these folks felt it necessary to isolate themselves from the sounds around them.  The trail generally runs through walls of bushes, and there’s a constant hum of cicadas and birdsongs, and the rustlings of small creatures—not an unpleasant susurration (I’ve been wanting to use that words for years.)

I saw an extremely well-fed groundhog that vanished into a burrow in the wink of an eye. Overhead, crows belabored a hawk and frogs croaked where a small stream ran.

It wasn’t busy.  Families on bicycles, with Mom and Dad bookending their flocks; younger, childless couples; and a majority of solitary walkers and riders. I wondered if the latter were fleeing crowded homes or empty ones.

A lot of riders wore the panoply of the full-fledged bicycle road-racer, which may have been à propos since the Tour de France ended today. Some actually looked like the stick-figure athletes who defy fatigue and good sense and ride hundreds of miles at a clip, but the majority of the expensively and colorfully-garbed men and women were, well, plump. I felt for them. The seats of racing bikes are simply not very comfortable, and none of the rotund riders were smiling as they passed me. Rather, many wore airs of aching resignation as they pedaled at a steady, mindless pace.

There were some real would-be racers, young men and women who sped by with shouts of “On your left!” and, two or three times, came perilously close to running me off the trail. One tanned young millennial almost did hit me, but then gave me the pleasure of having a flat a hundred yards down the road. I walked by and smiled indulgently as he wrestled the front wheel off his 87-speed bike.

When I finally got to the playing fields, there were no ball games. Not one. Not even a father and son playing catch. The fields were completely empty, forlorn, even. Possibly Virginia has laws against softball on Sundays, I don’t know and no one at the nearby community center knew either. There’d been games yesterday, and some were scheduled for tomorrow evening. “It’s because of the churches,” said an older man whose tee-shirt told me he was a Trail Patrol. “The churches don’t want you having a good time on Sundays.” He rode off on his recumbent bicycle, a complicated vehicle that looked like a cross between a very low wheelchair and uncomfortable beach furniture.

I ate the peach and the nuts while seated on a park bench watching the parade of Lycra-clad bottoms pass by. Few were attractive, and I was reminded of the modern saying that stretch pants are a privilege and not a right. I headed home.

By Mile-7 my feet were getting pretty sore. I started walking like some of the homeless people I occasionally see on the trail, shuffling, head down, string bag dangling from one hand. By Mile-8 I seriously considered calling Uber. I began to envy the bicyclists, large-bottomed or not. I ate the other peach and finished all the water. At Mile-9 I weighed the possibility of spending the night on one of the benches.

Half an hour later, I spotted my car 500 yards away. When I was nearly there I lost the shuffling gait, stood up straight, and walked the last 100 feet with graceful determination. My Fitbit said I’d walked 10.2 miles. Imagine that.

Ten miles? Piece of cake.

 

   

I Wanted To Write About...

Here’s what I wanted to write about today: Friends.  Real ones, assumed ones, false ones, friends of convenience and inconvenience. How sometimes it’s difficult to tell them apart, and how friendships, new and old and developing, are heartbreaking, tenuous and glass-fragile. Friends come and go, they vanish and reappear. Often, they simply vanish, or their behaviors become mysterious, an unshared and destructive secret. I spent some time thinking about two very good friends, both passed away, and how even after many, many years, I still miss them.  And the difference between friends and Facebook friends, some of whom I’ve never met.  

Also, I wanted to comment on the weather, which in my part of the country has been unseasonably wet. My yard greener than it’s ever been, with jungle-like growths of vines and creepers and odd, wild green things I’ve never seen before.

I wanted to write about the flock of turtles that resides a few minutes from my house. I’ve befriended them with kernels of corn shaved from a fresh ear. There are painted turtles, box turtles, and two snappers. One is huge, at least twenty inches across, and the people who live near the pond say he/she’s been there as long as they can remember. Snapping turtles in the wild can live up to 70 years; they have no predators and lead indolent lives. Goliath, as the neighbors call him, has recently been joined by a mate and/or buddy. The two are prehistoric and dinosaur-like. They rule the pond, which they share with a dozen-or-so goldfish. Someone got tired of cleaning the aquarium and dumped the ornamental fish there, and they’ve flourished.

I wanted to write about how my small Northern Virginia town is being eaten up by developers who erect monstrous buildings that in one sweep destroy the personality of the place. One development, half-a-mile from me, will be erected on land that recently was a nursery surrounded by small houses like mine, built in the early 1960s and designed for middle-income families. Now that land is eight acres of red dirt without a single blade of grass. Farther down my town’s main street, a family restaurant that had been there fifty years was torn down, as were a few tiny row houses where elderly couples lived. About a year ago, Hilton bought land abutting the main street, tore down old shops, and put up a cheap businessmen’s hotel with a happy hour bar and parking abutting two single-family homes.  Now, a ten-floor apartment building is going up a few hundred yards away.  There will be a Harris Teeter on the ground floor, and a variety of chi chi shops—Lululemon, an expensive florist, a place specializing in classy candies and coffees.

I wanted to write about my backyard pond which, thanks to the weather, is gloriously floral. At night, a large stag comes and drinks from it. He’s clumsy; he knocks over the lotus and water hyacinths pots. His hooves leave two-inch-deep indentation in my lawn and he deposited a mound of deer shit in my driveway.

I wanted to write about how my indoor/outdoor cat and a largish fox have reached an entente cordial of sorts. The fox makes strange noises, like an old man coughing in the night. They stare at each other and neither gives way until I or my neighbor comes out. Then the fox runs barking skittering sounds. My cat is unflustered and displays splendid feline indifference.

And then I wanted to write about writing, and I how recently found myself in the company of a young man who had done everything to make his first book successful, except write it. He had a plot, and knew how the characters would interact. He had already established their personalities, their traits, their assets and their shortcomings. They would be handsome, and engaging, and smart, and witty, and full of winning dialogues. “My book,” the young man said, “is going to be great!”

I was proud of myself for keeping mostly silent. I said I’d be interested in seeing the book when it was finished. The young man seemed surprised at first, and then alarmed.

I wanted to write about the Tour de France which, this year, failed to interest me.

I wanted to write about the month of July, which is always lonely.

And lastly, I wanted to write about life and keeping cancer at bay for almost six months now, and how some have been less fortunate and lost that cruel battle.

That’s the good thing about writing: There’s always a wealth of stuff to write about, great and meaningless, lasting and temporary.

Thank heavens for words.