Month: September 2016

Builders:

For a number of years after 9/11, my Father would often speak with a nurse who worked in his cardiologist’s office. The woman had lost her brother on 9/11, he was working as a police officer in the World Trade Center. The woman had learned that my father, for a very small reason, had not been on the 89th floor that day. She held out hope against hope, that some similar reason had drawn her brother away before the collapse. She came to believe that my father, who was very kind to her and patiently listened, believed her.

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Eventually they found her brother’s service pistol, identified it by it’s serial number. This didn’t convince her he was gone. My father, when directly confronted with this woman’s anguish, wouldn’t do anything to extinguish the tiny flame of hope she desperately kept. Between WWII, Korea and Vietnam, my father had seen plenty of hope extinguished, but something inside him couldn’t be a participant in it now, particularly when it became apparent that fewer and fewer people in the woman’s life could once again listen to her consider the possibility that her brother might be in a hospital somewhere, misidentified with a brain injury.

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Although each of these conversations distressed him deeply, my Father never made any attempt to change offices nor arrive on the woman’s day off.  It was just a quiet obligation that he felt that fate had handed him. After a number of years, the woman no longer worked in the office. My father never said anything about it, but it was obvious that it relieved him of a great weight.

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Today, on the 15th anniversary of 9/11, the nation’s remembrance is beginning to feel a little rehearsed. Every year, more people become distant from it, just like the woman’s co-workers in her office. In time it was fading for them, but not for her. I have no idea where she is today, but I hope she has found some measure of peace at her own pace. It’s a nice thought, and I want it to be true, but I keep having a disturbing image of a very lonely human being carefully studying the images of todays televised remembrance, looking once again for the face of her brother.

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I took the photo above on 9/12/01. The letter is taped to Washington Rock, a 500′ ridge a few miles from my parents’ house in N.J. It has a direct view of lower Manhattan from 10 miles. Hundreds of people stood in silence there and watched the smoke pour out of the city. The letter was a note to a dead friend promising to take care of his children and to raise them as he would have. Below it is my Father’s business card. Note the address of World Trade Center #2. Read the whole story at this link: Thought for the Day – 9/11

Builders:

In the middle of the night, the classic movie channel ran a little remembered film from 1969,” The Gypsy Moths.” I stayed up to watch it straight through. The film has always meant something to me since I first saw it in the 1970s.  I had not seen it in 25 years.  Of course the film never changes, but my life has, and in this way, some pieces of literature and art that have always spoken to you, offer an excellent yardstick to see what you have learned thought and felt in the last quarter century. And so it was, and I watched the film again, uninterrupted in the quiet hours of the night.

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Burt Lancaster, in the dark jumpsuit, was the center of the film. He was 56 at the time, at the peak of his power in Hollywood. He spent the late 1960s making films like “The Swimmer” which were important to him, but had no hope of being popular, widely appreciated nor commercially successful. “The Gypsy Moths” is one of these films.

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  The 1940 Howard DGA-15  above was the only plane in the film. In the 1990s I did a lot of work on two magnificent Howard restorations, and a bit of flying in them. As great as they were, I am drawn much more to the plane in the film, with it chipped paint and worn condition. In 1969 no one had given much thought to creating an industry around competitively restoring old aircraft and handing out trophies and awards, and writing articles about them for spectators to admire. In 1969, a DGA-15 was not an investment nor anyone’s personal trophy, it was just a big old workhorse, a plane valued for it flying abilities only.   The particular Howard from the film is still on the FAA roles, it lives in Temecula California. There is a part of me that really hopes it looks exactly as it did in the film, and if it doesn’t, I would actually prefer not to know that.

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Most people think of The Gypsy Moths as a film centered on skydiving.  To Paraphrase Gene Shalit, A Streetcar Named Desire was not a film about public transportation, nor is The Gypsy Moths a film about skydiving. The film is a harsh examination of the differences between people who discard “normal” lives in pursuit of feeling alive, and those that watch this from the outside, knowing that the security they got in trade for their own dreams may not have been such a good deal. When you tell people you are building your own plane, and they have an emotional negative reaction, you are looking at the exact same human terrain that is covered in this film.

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  The most poignant moment in the film happens when Burt Lancaster asks Debora Kerr, the secure but anguished housewife to leave with him, and experience life. As desperately as she wants release from her middle-aged life in small town America, she is terrified of change and will not go. She is the horse who will not leave the burning barn. There is a part of her that just wants to be abducted to a new life, but Lancaster softly explains that being alive is something you have to want for yourself.

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It isn’t a “nice” film, and frankly, almost none of the films that mean something to me are “nice” the same way that don’t need paintings or photos to be “pretty.” I have people I care about, who spend their lives in pursuit of “happiness” as a goal to give meaning to their lives. Such people would find this film distasteful because it highlights conflicting lives and evolves as an unresolved tragedy, there is precious little happiness to be found in it, however, it is filled with awareness and understanding, which happen to be the things I have pursued to give meaning to my life.

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-ww.

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