It’s January of 1970. I’m stationed in Omaha, Nebraska with the US Air Force. When I arrived at Offutt AFB in late July, I replaced a man who had been only a year ahead of me in my pediatric residency. We seemed about the same size, so I bought all of his uniforms. Turned out that I was a teensy bit taller than he was, but the USAF didn’t care if my pants were slightly of what used to be called the “high-water” variety.
The war in Viet Nam was still cooking awfully well, and although I seemed relatively safe in Nebraska, where no Viet Cong had been seen in months, there were never any guarantees in the armed forces in wartime. There were 37 draftee physicians at that hospital, and we knew that any one of us could be picked up and deposited in Southeast Asia if a need was felt. It happened twice to guys who were serving there with me.
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But at that moment, the worst thing that I had to deal with was Winter. The winter weather in Omaha tended toward ice, freezing drizzles, and sleet.
There was a gentle uphill to the hospital from the house on the base where my family and I lived, but sometimes cars just couldn’t cut even that modest slope, and I would walk the mile to work rather than take my car.
Earlier in the week I had read about a new album done by Simon and Garfunkel. Up to that time, I knew them only for the tune Sounds of Silence. But this new effort of theirs was getting raves, so I bought the album, and one icy afternoon I finally had time to put it on a turntable for a listen. The album title was Bridge Over Troubled Water, and I positively loved it.
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For the next couple of years it was in constant rotation at our casa. It has held up well, and when I put it on yesterday I felt that old connection. I remembered how it had cut through the gloom I had felt in 1970, serving during a war I knew was the result of a series of bad choices by our government. Lethally bad choices.
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When I first arrived at the base, I was required to make an appointment to introduce myself to the hospital commander. Col. Lewis had only one photo in his office. It was not of his wife, nor of his children, but was a framed 8×10 full frontal picture of the face of his English bulldog.
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Of all the ballads I’ve listened to in my life, there is none that I have liked better than Simon and Garfunkel’s version of The Boxer. Its durability is revealed by the scores of covers out there, and that they each reveal the core of truth in the lyrics in their own way. A song of the human spirit, and a view that I happen to hold. We are a mongrel lot, we humans, but we are an absolute bugger to completely beat down.
… Or cut him till he cried out in his anger and his pain
I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains …
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Here’s an a cappella version from England.
A version done by Portuguese musicians.
Waylon Jennings does a fine country-western version.
It’s all in how you tell the story, non?
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One Sunday morning at the Unitarian Church in Omaha NE, there was a part of the service where members of the congregation were given the opportunity to share. I had to miss that particular meeting because of being on call, but when a fellow stood up and said he had puppies to share, my family voted to accept his offer.
Lady had no pedigree to speak of but on the day she joined our family she was simply an irresistible fluffball. My kids at the time were 1,2,4, and 5 years old. I wasn’t sure that we were ready for dog ownership, but it was obvious that if I expressed any reservations and it came to a vote it would be a solid 5 to 1. I did not have the courage for that fight.
She turned out to be an excellent and well-behaved member of the family. Maybe the best-behaved of all of us, actually. She had one quirk, and we have no idea why this was so, but she only tolerated people with fair skins. There was a dark-skinned meter reader who came to the house periodically and we had to bring the dog in and put her in a room until he had left because she would go into a fury.
And a young boy in the neighborhood had a hereditary liver disease which made him perpetually jaundiced, which also put him on Lady’s short list of people I might very well bite. Whenever Peter was nearby we were especially watchful.
When we lived in Buffalo NY there was a power line that reached from the alley to our home, and which passed through the branches of a huge butternut tree. A squirrel would regularly traverse that line from the alley as far as the tree to gather nuts, and Lady would run back and forth beneath the line, barking as the rodent made its rounds. She was frustrated every day that this happened, until about a week before we moved out of that house. When the squirrel made a misstep and fell to the ground, where Lady waited.
End of story.
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Little Home In The Valley 