Four years ago, I bought an old fixer upper farmhouse, with a barn and six acres, in Belfast, Maine.
I go there off and on, although I haven't moved there as planned.
Two summers ago, I was working on a tree house in Kittery, Maine, when Sonia emailed me to come up to the First Annual Belfast Summer Festival. The Belfast Chamber of Commerce had decided to let all the businesses stay open until ten at night, to close a couple of streets and have some entertainment, and to call the enterprise The First Annual Belfast Summer Festival.
Q. How many Buddhists does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Two.
One to change the light bulb, and one to not change the light bulb.
Sonia is my best friend in Belfast, a friendship which began with her laughing from the next booth when I told this joke to Thelma, my real estate agent for the old fixer upper., at their real estate office in Belfast. Anyway, I decided to go the First Annual Belfast Summer Festival, and left Kittery after working on the tree house for the day.
I didn't get up to Belfast until eight thirty pm, as it's a three hour drive up from Kittery.
Several people in Sonia's party had left by then, but there was one guy left with her when we
met, as arranged, at the local fin and claw on the main dock in Belfast harbor.
Sonia introduced me to John Macone, the remnant of the original party, and we ordered light fare.
John Macone is a good friend of one of Sonia's six ex husbands. That's how they met. That's the connection. John is a friend of the fifth of Sonia's six ex-husbands. Sonia calls herself a serial monogamist, but I think she has just confused dating with marrying. Sonia is not interested in John romantically. I am not privy to John's side of this story.
Anyway, John grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, served in the Strategic Air Command, and is an avid flier and talker. John talked about my grandfather, my father's father, for a while, because my grandfather had loaned him a small brick house on his property in Concord, and John remembered the fun my grandfather had with dynamite, blowing up rocks in the horse pastures. This was the 1950's.
Somewhat appalled, I wondered why this was happening, because that grandfather is not, by a long shot, one of my favorite subjects. That grandfather would have set Madame Defarge knitting. I lived in Concord from ages ten to twenty, and that grandfather shadowed those years. Then John Macone stopped talking about my grandfather and said: "I want to tell you a story about your father." I might have rolled my eyes at that point because, since Vietnam, my father is not exactly my favorite subject either. I had some good strawberry shortcake in front of me, and at this point I didn't know if I was going to lose my appetite. However, this stranger's monologue about my own family, on a dock in Belfast, Maine, was so unlooked for, that I was curious as to where it would lead.
I mentioned that John is an avid flier. So was my father. John told me that at the time they both had small airplanes based at Hanscom field near Concord, and they were both waxing their airplanes or something like that, when this story unfolded. Anyway, there they were, my father waxing his Navion and John waxing his whatever, when my father told John: "I want to tell you a story. I was in the Army Air Corps during World War II. I was based at an airfield in Italy. One day I was on patrol, up over the alps, flying over a glacier. I looked down....
OK. I'm going to interrupt my father's story to John Macone for a minute here. This patrol was probably in 1944. Six years earlier, in 1938, my father was captain of the Harvard ski team. That summer he took Blixen, his Ford, on a ship to Europe, and did his own version of the grand tour of Europe. On his grand tour, he went up and skied on some glaciers in the alps. That was 1938. Thirty years later, say 1968, Dad all but cried into the telephone to me, this was before my brother was killed,
"What do you think I am, a murderer?" This telephone call was part of his pressure to get me into the military, during the years I myself was at Harvard, during the war on Vietnam. Anyway, Dad's question: "What do you think I am, a murderer?" startled and horrified me. I did not answer him. Nor did his question sit well. Ever since, I have wondered if or what he had done with his P-51, with its six fifty caliber machine guns, to make him lob that question at me.
OK. Back to Dad's story, from John Macone, now the good friend of Sonia's fifth of six ex husbands, at the fin and claw on the main dock, in Belfast, Maine.
"One day I was on patrol, up over the alps, flying over a glacier. I looked down and saw a
German patrol, on skis, making its way across the glacier. I had six fifty caliber machine guns in the wings, but I couldn't do it. I waggled my wings at them, and flew away."
And so John Macone finished his story about Dad, and even though I finished my strawberry shortcake,
I felt lighter.
As to this story, no one that I know had ever heard it. Dad died in 1998.
This story was out of the blue.
April 2011