I Was a Teenage Existentialist #16: Turning Down the Eagle

No pinky ring, no trip to Chicago

People who go to New Mexico swoon over the desert, saying “how spiritual it is.” I have never found that to be true; the woods and lakes are spiritual to me. The desert has no water- do I have to point that out?? There are no trees to provide shade, you have to hide in cave-like buildings all day. If you don’t drink ten gallons of water you fall asleep. There are poisonous critters everywhere. The only time it’s nice out is at night, and that’s when you step on the poisonous critters in the dark. In the woods, if it gets hot you just go swimming, in fresh water. Or hang out under the trees. Doi. In the woods, you could project what it was like for The Indians; no highways, no cars, no suburbs.

I spent some time later in life in connection to some native communities, especially Jim Miller, the Dakota Veteran who founded the Sacred Ride that commemorated the 38 Dakota warriors, who were hung by the neck until dead in America’s greatest single execution, a war crime of killing Indian prisoners of war, that happened in Mankato in my own state of Minnesota, in 1862, the day after Christmas, because you don’t do something like that on Christmas Day….. you wait til the morning after. You can look up the YouTube Video Dakota 38 for that story. That’s one of those Historical Heartaches that you carry with you wherever you go, once you have acquired it, and if you read enough history and learn enough, you can become very tired. The Historian’s Dread. Like going to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and tracing the name of someone you know with your finger, like Tom Schaefer, or visiting a concentration camp like Sachsenhausen, or visiting the King Center in Atlanta. Taking in the loss. Or looking at Paris and remembering how it was the Paris police, The French, who rounded up all the Jews for the Nazis, and that Paris was surrendered without a shot being fired, because they wanted to preserve the beauty of the city, and so what if the Nazis run the place for a few years, France can be the Jewel in the Nazi Crown, like India was for the Brits. That’s where things are going- Italy, Spain, Germany, Vichy. Whereas the British were ready to fight block by block and house by house to keep their self-respect. Paris will always wear a shroud for me.

But eventually, as much as I loved camping, I turned down the Eagle Scout award. I was 15. It was the move of a contrary, and it hurt my mom’s feelings. Dad never said anything. I got all the Merit Badges, I advanced in rank- Tenderfoot, Second Class, First Class, Star, and Life, but denied my mother the pleasure of saying she had four Eagle Scouts, because she had taught me it’s bad to lie, and I already lied to get confirmed in the American Lutheran Church. At the time, it was 1970, and the Vietnam War was in my face, my neighbor across the street, Tom Schaefer was a Marine in Vietnam for two weeks when he was killed, he used to babysit me sometimes, we’d play war games with Matchbox toys and blocks, my brothers were on student deferments but facing the draft, they had their draft cards, and it seemed to me that the Christian Church was all in favor of killing as many Commies in South Vietnam as possible. Buddhists are atheists, so are Commies. As Minnesota novelist Tim O’Brien said in The Things They Carried, “My people didn’t even know the French had already been there.” We knew no world history, we didn’t know Jack Shit. But I knew that at the Scoutmaster’s Conference and the Board of Review, I’d have to say I believed in God, and I didn’t, because The God Thing at that time was tied to The Christian Thing that churches were in favor of the war, and if that’s the kind of God they worshipped, I could not believe in that; and it had begin to dawn on me that the Scouts wasn’t so much about camping as it was a paramilitary organization to get us ready for the Armed Forces, to learn how to Follow Orders; and I did not want to cooperate. We didn’t know till later that we killed 3 million Vietnamese, probably 2 million Cambodians, a stray 1 million in Laos and elsewhere, our own little unacknowledged Asian Holocaust. But that made no headlines back home because those people weren’t European, and we were The Good Guys. And we do not have plaques or historical markers around to remind us of how many Vietnamese we killed, like they do in Germany, all over Berlin, brass plaques marking this family of 9 Jews and that building of 50 and this family of two arrested Here, because we Americans made sure that Our Little Holocaust took place 7,700 miles away.

But the context here was not so heroic. I wasn’t so much an angry young man, I was uncooperative, a bit of a pill, kind of a shit sometimes, a depressed teenager, at a time when there wasn’t any medication for that. And a lot of things fed into that depression.

I was born on Jan. 13th, and I was told that when I turned 13 it would be my “Golden Birthday” so I kind of looked forward to that, a Golden Birthday and becoming a Teenager, which is all anyone talked about since I was little. It was the Golden Age of being a teenager, that didn’t exist before WW2, when you went from being a kid to having a job. I say “Kind of looking forward to it” because my birthday was kind of demoted, coming so soon after Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years, people were kind of partied out. Bruce’s was Oct. 15th, before the start of the holidays, and he was second born, so that was celebrated, David was 2 weeks later, they usually made an effort for The Firstborn. Dad’s and Gary’s were both in March, so that was combined, and Mom tried to get us to be nice to Dad. Mom’s was the same week as Mother’s Day, and she got sad every year because she only got one present, Dad was too self-involved to make a big deal of either one for Mom’s sake; and Scott’s was July 16th, which made for a nice Midsummer party opportunity. So I experienced birthdays as a kind of private thing, I did not ask for anything and did not expect anything, not out of choice but out of habit, because as I got older, like 12, birthdays for me became less and less of a thing; just like becoming an Eagle Scout had diminished in value.

When David got his Eagle, there were uncles and aunts and great uncles and grandparents to celebrate at a banquet; when Bruce got his, there was a smaller spread, fewer relatives, an aunt without the uncle; when Scott got his, Dad was working, and it was Mom and me and Gary, who was #3 and developmentally disabled (the word at the rime was “Retarded” which is pretty jarring to hear now). So Scott was disappointed in the turnout, and I could see the writing on the wall. It meant less and less. I became uninspired.

Also, before 1963, David and Bruce got to go to Chicago on the train with Grammy, mom’s mom, Pearl Olson, and they got gold pinky rings with their initials; Scott got the ring, but not the trip, Grammy had died by then, 1963, the year three of my grandparents, the President, and my hamster (Hamlet) all died; the year Death became familiar to me. I got no pinky ring, no trip to Chicago. A faded tradition. My value seemed to diminish as I got older.

So my 13th birthday was the start of my teenaged years, and it was 1968. And that was a big, big year.

#30#