Cancer Doesn’t Care

It hides in the dark recesses of your body and looks for holes in your immune system. Like the hotel burglar going down the hall looking for unlocked doors. Only you can’t control your immune system. You have the one you were born with. Some like my Grandfather Wattonville’s could ward off everything except an LA City bus. Some, like my Grandfather Gallup’s let him down at 49. It doesn’t care who you are or what kind of life you led. You can create technology that changes the world like Steve Jobs or you can be my best friends little sister Carol who has just decided to forgo further treatment. She has three months. 27 years ago it invaded my left kidney and was 1mm from killing me. Now it’s returned putting in an appearance on the roof of my mouth. My oncologist says it’s a very unusual case. The 1994 tumor was fully encapsulated. And the lesions on the roof of my mouth are the same cancer. I’m getting a good look at 27 years worth of medical advances and it’s pretty amazing stuff. I just hope they work as well as the surgery did in 1994. 

The Girl on the Train.

• So let’s see if this works. Marilyn and I are watching a Documentary about Leonardo da Vinci. And the paintings remind me of something that happened in Italy some years back. We were on our way from Florence to Venice to meet friends and show them our Italy. When I’m there I play a little game with myself that consists of finding a face in the street that matches a painting in a museum we visited. This was backwards from that. Modern Italy is a sea of cell phones, busy people and business travelers. The young lady seated across from us was one of the busy people. Her cell phone rang constantly, she had heard us speaking English, I don’t think she had any idea Marilyn understood her conversations. None of which were business related, it was her birthday and all her friends were calling to wish her happy birthday. She was an unusual beauty, very well dressed and her face was long and narrow but she had beautiful eyes.  We didn’t speak to her and she she paid us no mind. We went to the airport, met our friends, checked into our hotel and a couple of days later we were in the Pallazo del Doge looking at the magnificent collection of artwork. Marilyn was looking at one of the maybe 400 year old paintings and there was the girl from the train. Long nose, pretty eyes, high cheekbones and all. Even the hair color was the same. Used to happen all the time, especially in Florence but with all the tourists not so much now. Just another reason to travel. 

Scars

 

I've got a lot of scars, some I got earning a living, one really big one I got when a skilled surgeon named Laurence Hildebrand took out my cancerous left kidney. And I got a couple of them growing up in Texas. The first house I remember living in was a duplex on Danville Street South of downtown Houston. It's gone now, replaced by a freeway but we lived there until shortly after  the end of the war and going to Kindergarten and First and Second Grade was the only time I ever went three years to the same school. After that it was two and move along. Not anybody's fault, Houston was growing like weeds in the late 40's. Got me used to making new friends and I did that. When we moved to a new subdivision along about 1946-47 there were a bunch of kids moving in along with us. The neighborhood was a lot like old Lincoln Village, or the area West of UOP, small houses with wall heaters, and being South Texas, screen porches.  No A/C, too humid for swamp coolers. We played baseball in the morning and if we had 15 cents (dime to get in, nickel for popcorn) we went to the Santa Rosa theater (air conditioned you know) to see a newsreel, a short subject, a cartoon and a feature film. I saw "Wake of  the Red Witch" 5 times. Only time I couldn't go to the show was if it was a Robert Mitchum movie, he got busted for smoking dope. Pretty funny now  If we didn't have 15 cents it was the Mutual game of the day on the radio with an oscillating fan to keep the air moving.

 

Couple of weeks ago I found out that the Houston School District has a project to put all the High School yearbooks from Houston on line. This is independent of all the commercial sites like Classmates and I think it's a hell of an idea as long as you have the money. So I began to peruse the Milby High School 1957 yearbook because if we had stayed in Texas that is where and when I would have graduated. I found some of my neighborhood buddies, a girl I crushed on, a girl who crushed on me, and a girl who was a skinny kid when I left in 1953 and grew up to be a real beauty. There was the son of a partner in a fried chicken franchise that was famous all over Texas. There was a kid named Tommy who ended my baseball career at 12 when he learned to throw a curve ball. And my best friend Willie who grew up to be an FBI agent of some repute. Willie's pic isn't here because his family  moved to central Texas the year after we came to California.  They were all good kids, nobody went to jail (I think) and we played all kinds of games together without any big fights.

So, Scars? The year after we moved in the developer began construction of a group of duplexes around the theater parking lot. They were  two story, built on slab foundations from a hollow red brick re-inforced with re-bar. The brick was delivered on flatbed trucks, stacked right on the bed of the truck and offloaded by hand. A small army of laborers stacked the bricks in a rectangular pattern with a void in the center about big enough for two of us to hide in. Now stack bricks with a hollow in the center and every self respecting Texas boy upon seeing this thinks "FORT" followed quickly by "CLOD FIGHT". There was a code to a clod fight. The clods had to be black clay, soft mud, not dried out. They could be as big as the diameter of a half dollar. And you had to throw them. No slingshots or catapults.  A team of two would hide in the brick pile and another team would attack, both sides threw clods until they ran out. One day a couple of kids we sort of knew from school showed up and joined in. One of them hit me with a well thrown clod that had a sharp rock in it. Split my head open just above my hairline. I bled like a stuck hog, the whole left side of my face was covered in blood. Mom was pretty level headed but when she saw me she lost it. Regaining her composure long enough to evaluate the cut she put direct pressure on it. Stopped the bleeding, got the iodine and patched me up. The scar has almost disappeared, I have trouble finding it now. The kid who threw the clod?. When my Dad saw him he took me aside and said "Don't hang around with him, Just don't". He wound up in Huntsville, for those of you who don't know Huntsville made Parchman Farms look like a church social. Worst prison in Texas and a contender for worst in the country. Dad had a good eye for miscreants. That kids  picture isn't here.
None of these kids were miscreants. They were all smart and got good grades. The girl second row center was the only one who could beat me in spelling bee's and math flashcard drills.  The kid second right is Jerry, he replaced me as lead singer in the school choir when my voice changed, Didn't last long, his changed too. The girl in the bottom row center is the skinny kid when I left who turned into a real beauty. When I went back in 1961 for a visit one of my neighborhood buddies was so in love with her it hurt to watch.

  

 

 This is a pretty good cross section of the kids from the neighborhood and the ones I went to school with.  Oh, the other scar? Mom bought me an Exacto knife with an assortment of blades to replace the single edged razor blades I used building model boats and airplanes. First thing I did, cut my left thigh open. That one you can see when I wear shorts.. Didn't tell anybody, taped it up. Bled a little and went to the store for some razor blades.



Glenn Gallup EM3 2048-815 USCGR 1959-1967

 

 

Kathleen has asked me to blog about growing up in Texas. My plan is to crawl up to the subject sideways like a crab. But when I’m done it should be a good series of posts. People who know me well know I was in the Coast Guard. The U.S.C.G. was founded in 1790, the Coasties and Marines have had a longstanding dispute about who came first. I’m not too worried about this, it was a long time ago. As was my service. Why the Coast Guard? Here’s where we get to Texas. After WW2 we moved to a subdivision South of downtown Houston. One of our neighbors was a fisherman and he had two sons a little younger than me. I had a fishing pole so I got to go along. His favorite spot was on the mainland just across from the Coast Guard Lifesaving Station on the inland side of Galveston Island. It was right on the East end, shielded from the Gulf and was probably good duty excluding Hurricane season. There was a crew quarters and a boat house on the highest part of the property. The boathouse had an elevated track that went into the water, inside the boathouse was a 26 foot a self righting motorized lifesaving boat  like this one.

Most of the time while we were fishing nothing much went on. An enlisted man might be tending the yard or sunbathing. Then a siren would sound and all hell would break loose. Guys would come running out of the crew quarters into the boat house, the doors would swing open and the boat would start rolling down the tracks with some guys pushing the cart it was cradled on.  About halfway down the engine would fire and by the time they hit the water the Coasties were mission ready. The coxswain was the only one you could see. He stuck his head out of a rubberized watertight gasket around his neck. The boat could roll over 360 degrees and he was the only guy who got wet. .And it was only his head.

So fast forward to 1953.  I moved to California, I forgot about fishing, I forgot about baseball, there were hotrods and California girls,  by 1959 I had my first aborted run at College. Vietnam was a blip on the horizon. Military service made a good bridge. One of my HS friends told me about the Coast Guard Reserve program designed for students and I signed up. I can’t say watching that boat head down the tracks and disappear into the Gulf of Mexico to save somebody was the deciding factor but it was a factor.

 

The Holocaust and Me.

I don’t know how many times I’ve said I’ve been lucky in my life. My luck has taken many forms. Sometimes it was meeting the right girl at the right time or having a job that let me grow at my own pace and rewarded me at every step. I’ve been a witness to auto racing history. And  because I was lucky enough to be born in 1939 I’m a witness to another kind of history. My first living memory is the Japanese attack on our military installations in Hawaii. The last time I saw my Mom and Dad as a young couple in love and dancing was VE Day, May 8^th, 1945.  When I was 10 or so my Mom and Dad  had had an eclectic group of friends. Everybody from University Professors to oilfield hands gathered around our Texas table. We ate BBQ and pot luck, the adults solved all the worlds problems. While us kids set off firecrackers and dug for worms so we could walk down to Buffalo Bayou to catch fish. One of the regular couples was a Cajun guy who was one of the D-Day heroes and his French wife. He wooed and won her with his Cajun French. She bonded with my Mom because of Mom’s sketchy French ancestry, and I began to notice that French girls were pretty, because she was. One night a single guy showed up, don’t have any idea who invited him, he was a Polish émigré engineer who like a lot of people came to Texas to work in the oil business. We ate good food and lots of cold beer flowed. At a point our Cajun friend remarked that he and his wife had just returned from France and Germany. They went to show their young son off to the French grandparents and revisit his charge across France and into Germany with the US Army. He made what seemed like an innocent comment about the speed with which the Germans were rebuilding their country (there were geopolitical reasons for this and the rest of us helped a lot). The Polish guy stood up and said something to the effect of “I’ll show you about your precious Germans”. Then he turned his back and hiked up his polo shirt, His upper back was a mass of scars, Seems he was in a work camp in Poland, didn’t get out of the way of the Camp Commander quite fast enough and was whipped from his calves to his shoulders. Then he had to show up for work the next day and fill his quota or be sent across the road to the gas chamber and the ovens. So he showed up. And worked. He said “I won’t show you the rest out of deference to the ladies but all my back is the same”

Now there are active Holocaust deniers in all walks of life including the Academic community and with the death of Elie Wiesel virtually the last well known witness to this black chapter in human history is gone. I’ve been face to face with some of the deniers and they pretty much run to a type Terminally stupid. They say stuff like “The Holocaust never happened but if it did it was a good idea” or variations on that theme. They ignore the non Jewish victims, in the millions in Eastern Europe and the 350,000 ethnic Germans who were either opponents of Hitler or Retarded. They ignore the Russians who suffered 85% of the European casualities.  And 10% of the Austrians. People like me who saw it second hand will be gone soon enough and the weak kneed among us may well defer to the deniers. If Israel is destroyed it will be the end of Western Civilization and it will go with a whimper. Glad I’m the age I am. And don’t have grandchildren.

The Girl With the Gypsy Feet

We can be having dinner or sitting in a departure lounge or hosting a party,  I look at her and see the girl I married almost 52 years ago. Last month it was John’s birthday. She was so alive I said to Kathleen “Look at your mother”

Anyway, I started this post over a year ago. It didn’t seem to gel so I saved it and moved on. Last year Marilyn went to work and fell in the parking lot breaking a bone in her foot. Marilyn is very used to doing what she wants to do when she wants to do it and being off her feet does not suit her at all. But it reminded me about this post and my intention to write a celebration of our travels. It still didn’t gel but that look at Johns party inspired me.

 

 

 

Kathleen reminded us that day last year that on June 17^th 1986 she took Marilyn by the scuff of the neck, sat her in a seat on a Pan Am 747, plied her with Brandy and took her to Paris. I’ll not forget the phone call (at 3AM) from Paris. “Start saving your money, I love it”. They went all over Paris, then on to Italy to connect with Marilyn’s Italian family. They filled up an album with photos, saw everything they could in three weeks or so and came back with memories they have to this day. And Marilyn became an International Gypsy. We’ve done our best to wear out a 747. Our friends in Europe keep asking us to come back and the Girl with the Gypsy Feet just keeps on organizing the trips and we keep packing the suitcases and getting on the planes. I don’t want to know when it’s the last one.

 

When I was young I went to five elementary schools (not counting a month at a school in Minneapolis while a polio epidemic raged in Houston). This was more a result of the Houston school district expanding at a furious rate than it was my family moving. Toss in spending most of my summers with one or the other of my grandparents in either Wisconsin or Minnesota and the result is I’m kind of a stick in the mud. Got my going out of my system early, or so I thought. Marilyn on the other hand was born in Stockton, lived here her whole life and until that fateful day in 1986 she had never been more than 500 miles from home. But once she got over her fear of flying she really made up for lost time. And that fear of flying was no act. When we took somebody to the airport her palms began to sweat and her lips got pale.

                    Here she is on the balcony of the Concortel in Paris on that fateful first trip.

 

 

 

                             

I don’t know how many times we’ve been to Europe. No, seriously, have no idea. I could keep track until about twenty. Then they all started to run together. In the back closet there are 31 little boxes of photographs and a bunch of photo albums. They aren’t so much pictures as they are memories of all the places we’ve been and people we’ve met. I know I should scan them all and put them on a cloud so we don’t lose them. One of these days I will.

Which brings me back to Marilyn.  What she did and the love she showed all those kids we hosted has been repaid a thousand times over. We go there and they come here. When they are here Marilyn cooks for them. When we are there they take us everywhere and show us things no tour guide even knows about.  Seems fair to me. There is another bonus as well and one we never thought of. All those kid have parents, and the parents are people who will put their precious son or daughter on a plane. Then the kid flies 5500 miles to live with strangers. So we met a whole bunch of interesting and accomplished parents. After a while one of the kids says  ”There’s somebody I want you to meet.” And another special young person enters our life. They share their lives with us, a few years later theres a phone call or an E-mail and a second generation shows up. I’ve read a lot of travel books, but because of Marilyn and her gypsy feet I got to live one.  Best of all, we still have our health and we aren’t done yet.

So for

Olivier and Catherine and Michele and Marco and Enrico and Valentina and Alberto and Nanu and Amilie and Laura and Allesandro and wives and husbands and significant others and parents and children and all the rest of you, we’ll be seeing you.

Last Trip?

So where to begin? I was born May 29^th, 1939 ------- Nahh.

Along about 1985 we met a 17 year old French guy named Oliver Amicel. It was a very casual meeting at the house of one of Marilyn’s co-worker. Cut to the chase, Glenn.  We became friends with Oliver, his sister Catherine and their parents Michel and Michele. Marilyn does very well in French now but 30 years ago we didn’t have a common language with the parents. So the friendship blossomed anyway. They came here, we went there. We toured California and France, and then we went to Italy together. 29 years passed.  When we went to Europe last Fall we had it in mind that it was the last trip. When we flew out of Rome and Paris there were more than a few tears. Michel is four years older than I am. He turned 80 Saturday the 16^th of January. We were invited to the party, we made some jokes about going and surprising them but it wasn’t really in the financial cards. ……. Until …..  our stockbroker called. Seems we didn’t take enough money out of the retirement fund last year. The check just covered the air fare and we had to go. Flew to London, changed planes and went on to Paris Orly. Now I’ve said before that I’ve been lucky all my life and this was no exception. I had a window seat on the right side of the Airbus and there was Paris, the air clear as crystal and the whole city spread out like a magic carpet of lights. I teared up again. In all the times we’ve landed in Paris I had never seen it like that.

We hid out with Oliver and his wife Francine, had a Friday night party with his friends, went shopping Saturday and Saturday night we went to the Amicels neighborhood restaurant for the party. The surprise went perfectly, I’ll remember the looks on their faces until the day I check out. Then we had a week in Paris to get acquainted with the family again.  

What’s the point of all this? What I have said over and over again. All we had to do was open the door. Marilyn did the heavy lifting,  We had the right house at the right time, we were the right age and I got that wonderful final approach to Orly airport. And a hell of a birthday party.