(Poet Andrew Marvell).
“The Grave’s a fine
And private place.
But none, I think,
Do there embrace.”
-Andrew Marvell, 1650
I fell asleep watching the Giants-Cards game last night. The brown chair seemed to reach around me and carry me to a private place of contemplation on the inside of my eyelids. It was a valiant try to stay awake after the tumult of the weekend. I don’t care that much about the National League Championship, but it is time to do my homework and see who the likely heroes are going to be when the matter is resolved after Game Seven, and the just who the opponents to the American League Detroit Tigers is going to be.
I know, I know. Why worry about fluff and nonsense when the reality of our short lives on this planet is so stark? Because we can’t take it in, not all at once. It will take a while for the world to stop wobbling. Mine has wobbled quite enough for one season, I think, so deferring rational thought to observation of men playing a boy’s game seems completely reasonable.
These trips to the Fall Classic of baseball, the World Series, are periodic for my home town heroes. The Tigers have won the Series four times, so there is no albatross on their white home uniforms like there was for the Red Sox and the Curse of the Bambino, or worse, for the loveable-loser Cubbies of Chicago. Forgive me a little emotion, since this has been an emotional few days. Detroit has always been a blue-collar team representing what used to be a blue-collar city. They are the oldest continuous one-name, one-city franchise in the American League, and have been playing inside the city limits for well over a hundred years- since 1894.
The Motor City is sinking into a small market team. Wayne County has declined from the fourth largest in America to the second-largest in the state of Michigan.
The Tigers are a legit hood-ornament for the bedraggled city. They were one of the original eight American League franchises, and periodically they inspire and compel.
Like 1968. I remember it as if it were yesterday: Coach “Mugsy” McGinnis calling us in from our positions on the practice field to listen to innings with particular significance on a little transistor radio. That was a victory for the ages, we thought at the time. It was a good run for the latter days of the American Century, and the Bengals came back in 1984, when we lived in Hawaii and were transitioning from working at Pacific Fleet headquarters to the staff of Bull Halsey’s old command, THIRD Fleet, then home-ported on Ford Island.
That is just one of the crossroads in which I could see my pal Mac, and the impact of his astonishing life. He had been at FIRST Fleet in San Diego, of course, in the mid-1950s, doing much the same mission as we did later, and he was the Assistant Intelligence Officer for the Pacific Fleet after the war concluded, and then again as the N2 in the sprawling Vietnam conflict.
For the 1984 Series, the Ex was pregnant with our younger son. The life transition of the time was pretty amazing. Marriage and two kids in Paradise changed life in every respect. Having one little kid was one thing, and it did not account for the remarkable familial dynamics where the opposing forces in high chairs and strollers almost outnumber you.
My wife was back in the Motor City to visit family when the riotous celebration that followed the victory over the San Diego Padres overtook the sedan in which she was riding. She said it was terrifying.
I do not recall 1968 being frightening, not that way. Maybe the behavioral conduct of society had changed by that time. I will have to think about that in more detail. Maybe the ‘60s were a watershed in more ways than just the rending of the social fabric to make celebration almost identical to riot.
I am sort of at a loss about what to scribble about this morning. I don’t want to dwell on Mac’s death, but I have not sorted out my sense of loss and disappointment at his abrupt departure.
What a freaking year; 2012 will go down in my personal annals as the most momentous of my life. Of course, there is plenty of this year to go, and the results of the debate, then the election, and then sorting out what Congress is going to look like and what it will do about the looming tax-and-Sequestration hoo-hoo that kick in even before whoever will get inaugurated at the end of January.
Crap.
But, I was thinking about taking a step back and looking at Mac’s astonishing life: long, honorable and filled with sacrifice and laughter.
I am glad I was able to escort him out to the Nimitz Day ceremony at the Office of Naval Intelligence, his last official trip. I was thinking about calling today’s story “A Man in Full,” borrowing the title of Tom Wolfe’s thick novel, and then I realized there is much more to it than that.
You cannot do it better than Mac did it. I am in awe of that. I have the rough draft of the “rest of the book,” that will cover the rest of his Navy career, and then the one after CIA. He was reluctant to speak of what he did at CIA, and so we will go light on that part. He told me some of that was still sensitive, or at least he considered it so. I asked point blank in one session what it was, and he grunted and told me. I won’t trouble you with it this morning, but there is world enough and time to get to it later.
Mac was heavily involved in the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process by which there was oversight on Intelligence Activities. He worked for a decade at CIA, but was drawn away by the increasing demands of his wife’s decline. He was primary care-giver for a decade, doing the cooking and cleaning, before Billie needed the additional care that only a nursing facility could provide.
Billie had been a nurse herself before embarking on a career in the real estate trade, always a good bet here in Washington.
That was one of the touching tales of his later years. The unique aspect of the real estate trade meant dividing up weekend duty responsibility of the agents. Billie had weekend duty one time just after the company had installed a new PBX phone system. The course of the disease had rendered her unable to manage the new phones, and Mac went in with her to operate it and route the calls.
Finally it was too much. Mac and his son took Billie to the facility, and the nurses there asked Billie to go on rounds with them. The familiar routine seemed to comfort her, and the transition to full-time care caused no complaint from her. It was another decade before she passed, and in the meantime Mac became involved in volunteer efforts to help people understand and cope with the ravages of a terrible, terrible disease.
He certainly helped me in dealing with the slow and painful loss of my Dad Raven. Some of his quotes seared with irony that came from hard experience.
“When you have seen one case of dementia,” he said solemnly at the Willow Bar, “you have seen one case of dementia.”
The corollary to the awful process was his description of Pneumonia as: “the Alzheimer’s patient’s best and last friend.”
(Mac dedicates a portrait of FADM Chester Nimitz at the Office of Naval Intelligence earlier this month. Nimitz OPINTEL Center Skipper Andrea Pollard is to the left, and Chester Nimitz Lay, the admiral’s grandson, is to the right. Photo ONI).
Mac was a man in full. His life was complete, his analytic skills were undimmed, even at the end, his sense of joy was never diminished by the aches and pains of aging. “It is not for sissies,” he said. And he went out on his own, and with his decision-making skills completely intact as he directed the Hospice people to turn up the morphine drip.
Damn, he was a good guy.
I can’t say that English poet Andrew Marvell was a pal- he was in his “fine and private place” centuries before our turn came to pirouette for a moment on the grand stage. Andy left us something good, though. His poem “To His Coy Mistress” has lines that resonate still, reminding us about Time’s Winged Chariot hot on our heels, and that if there was world enough, and time, we could accomplish great things.
I have the rest of that book on our pal Mac that I need to put together, while there is time. I will complete the manuscript, and may inflict some of it on you before we are done here. He was a man in full, to borrow Tom Wolfe’s phrase, and his life is worth celebrating.
I will fill you in on the outline of that book tomorrow. Plus, we will know if it is going to be the Cards or the Giants who face off against Detroit in the morning. It was the Cards the Tigers faced in 1968.
I remember. It was a fine thing.
(Tiger catcher Bill Freehan blocks “Sweet Lou” Brock of the Cardinals at the plate to save the Series. Photo Detroit Free Press.)
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com