The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks!

Last week was very busy at our house. I celebrated the twin pleasures of my daughter’s high school graduation and my 18th Father’s Day. I’m not usually a reflective sort, but when my daughter and I reach these milestones, I always remember the day we started our journey together.

I sat in the hallway of Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati, OH, pulling on scrubs and preparing to watch my daughter come into the world. She would be a Cesarean baby. I entered the room and stood beside my wife, holding her hand and waiting for our lives to change completely. The doctors cut, my wife’s glasses fogged up from her tears, and I stood watching the whole thing unfold. At one point, the doctor asked how I was doing - apparently fearing I might faint like many fathers do - and I said, “I’m fine Doc, you’re not cutting me.”

With the Doctor into her abdomen up to his elbows, Marcia failed to see the humor.

Claire was a large baby - 10 lbs. 6 oz. - and born with a small hip defect that was painlessly corrected within a few months. Because of the surgery, Marcia was’t able to do much in the days that followed. I held, fed, and changed Claire for the first time and with those chores done, I blinked my eyes a few times and found myself sitting in the bleachers of a high school in California. The sun was bright and warm and the graduates sat on the field in their green robes and mortarboards. I could easily find Claire, distinguished by her lithe, nearly 6 ft. frame, her flame-red hair, and the gold rope and medals she wore to signify graduating with honors and competing as a shot-putter and discus thrower.

We’ve had many chances to celebrate over the years and thankfully, few things to fret. She’s truly a marvel, but not in the ways you might think.

The truth is that Claire has taught me so much more than I’ve ever taught her. I did the things fathers are expected to do - teaching her to read and ride her bike. I dove into the pool for her first swimming lessons or took her trick or treating during a blinding snowstorm. Holding her as she sobbed at the breakup with her first boyfriend and attending more ceremonies, school plays, and track meets than I can count were just the perks of being a Dad. She handled the heavy lifting. She learned and grew and turned into an extraordinarily balanced and well-mannered young woman. She’s one smart kid.

I know this because I’ve learned so much from her. As a life-long sufferer of depression, I learned there really is happiness in life. She taught me to be more supportive and less self-centered. At her knee, I learned patience and understanding. And, watching her grow from each new experience, I learned how I had grown and learned too. She has changed my life in so many ways I feel a deep indebtedness that I don’t think I can ever repay.

She’ll be leaving to attend college this fall. Rather than being sad about beginning a life separate from hers, I find I’m looking forward to it. Sure, I’ll miss her, but one of the things she’s taught me is that everyone needs space. Everyone needs to learn how to live their own life and now her life is becoming her own. As she moves on to that life, Marcia and I will be using the things she’s taught us to move along and redefine the lives we live. There’ll be more than enough challenges, but I’m confident we’ll weather them well by using the things Claire has taught us. Her goodness and strength will make that possible.

So there’s only one thing left to say, “Thanks. I love the woman you’ve become and the man you’ve helped create”.

The Poobah is a featured contributor at Bring It On!

I’ve been around aviation in one form or another for much of my life. I’ve spent hundreds of hours flying into remote airstrips and large international airports hauling everything from bodies to a small herd of goats. A daily intimacy of airplanes anthromorphizes them. Each one has its own personality made up of idiosyncratic quirks learned by sight, sound, or touch. For me, airports can sometimes be the same.

Templehof airport in Berlin is one of those places. When the Nazis built it, it was the largest building in Europe, so massive that you can easily see the U-shaped colossus on radar. Tempelhof was the starting point for the Berlin Airlift that kept Berlin from starving after the Soviets closed off the city. Nearly 30 years after my last visit it’s no longer a pilot’s ghost town, but a reliever airport to handle spill-over traffic from Berlin’s main airport.

I visited the place several times while in the Air Force. In my day, the Cold War was still on and the Berlin wall stood in all its shameful, ugly glory. You could easily see the difference between bright, modern West Berlin and dowdy East Berlin even if that scar on the face of the divided city wasn’t there.

I remember the end of the runway was lined almost to its boundary by sooty apartment buildings where Berliners sometimes waved from windows and tended to their daily lives. But the most impressive sight was the immense terminal. Massive on radar, it was an awe-inspiring monument to Hitler up close. Albert Spier designed it to emphasize the superiority of Germany and from close up, it’s tempting to say he might have succeeded. His terminal was jacked up on architectural steroids and swelled by grandiose Nazi fervor for a madman.

When we taxied to the parking area, we were alone in a space that could hold hundreds of airplanes. It was easy to imagine the chaos of the Airlift. The Candy Bomber became famous here as the hopeful face of an America that still did good. By the time I arrived, our image was already tarnishing.

With the roar of the engines gone, the place was almost silent - nothing other than some far-off traffic noise and the ticking of our engines as they cooled. Our footsteps echoed as we entered the building. In those days, only a small portion was in use by a contingent of U.S. Air Force and Luftwaffe clerks. The rest of the building was dusty and many of the floor to ceiling windows were boarded up. Ticket counters and shops were shuttered and the guttural German flight announcements were only a distant memory.

Cargo unloaded, we taxied out and left in a roar, back over the dirty apartment buildings and over the wall to our airbase in England. For me, Tempelhof lives on as a memory of grande plans ruined and good people helping others. I knew Tempelhof as a place with a rich history that once played a large role in the history of the planet. From the ugly reasons for its birth to its redemption as a lifeline to the starving, it is - and was - an important place that deserved to live on.

The Berlin city council recently voted to raze it to make way for something modern and no doubt immanently disposable in 20 or 30 years. It’s become an unwanted relic with its historic patina rubbed off. It will succumb to the wrecking ball - dust to dust as it were. And for me, that’s a shame.

The Poobah is a featured contributor at Bring It On!

Thirty-eight years ago I was a high school student. College campuses were afire with more protests than you could shake a stick at. At the risk of sounding like a “these whippersnappers today…” speech, kids today really don’t appreciate exactly how much general upheaval there was.

At the beginning of my sophomore school year an earnest young college organizer came to our school to form an environmental club. The club was a way for those of us still needing permission slips to attend anti-war protests to get involved in something “radical”. Our parents figured this whole environmental thing was nothing but an extension of Lady Bird Johnson’s Beautify America campaign and it seemed a safe bet a state trooper wouldn’t whack us in the head for picking up trash. For our part, we were excited more by the prospect of being able to skip class for club activities than about picking up trash.

The organizer spent his time telling us about environmental products available in the Whole Earth Catalog. Clearly, one day we’d all shower with water heated by solar stills and build our geodesic houses out of the cast off hoods of cars. Beer bottles, presumably since there were always so many lying around the commune, also seemed like a futuristic building material. We’d all crap in bio-composting outhouses too. Later, as I grew up, those meetings made it easier to understand why our cars weren’t flying, our robots weren’t sweeping our floors, and why Tang was the penultimate triumph of the recently won space race.

Ah Mom!
Over the months, the club began to disintegrate. Long lectures about composting dinner scraps - like your Mom would allow that - didn’t much hold the interest of a bunch of young horndogs trying to recruit cute chicks for the mostly male club. But in mid-winter our organizer started to talk about a huge celebration called Earth Day that would be another Woodstock. In April, millions of kids would descend on Washington and celebrate the Earth in a way no one could have ever imagined. We asked what there would be to do and our organizer simply said “celebrate” in that doe-eyed way true hippies had back then. They didn’t need no stinkin’ plans, everyone just “went with the flow”.

Ya dig?

April 22 came around and we all piled into the organizer’s wheezing VW Microbus - which spewed more pollution than a coal burning locomotive - and headed for Washington. The traffic jam was horrendous. Cars boiled over and many of the more laid back simply stopped in the middle of the street and wandered away to swim naked in the polluted Potomac. We were sure the Earth was being celebrated somewhere in the Washington Metro area, but it was something we took on faith rather than actual participation.

As with many 60s-era revolutions, the club ran out of steam. Our organizer didn’t show up to our meetings. Word had it he’d met a girl with hairy legs and flowers in her hair and they’d packed up the Microbus to move to Haight-Ashbury. We discussed merging our club with the primarily female student poetry magazine - Rutabaga Fudge - but stopped short of a real merger when it became apparent that listening to poetry might actually be required. We still got out of class to attend meetings, although our only further activity that year was to show up on picture day, hold up our stomach-churning green eco-flag, and pile atop one another to flip off the camera.

We’ve Come a Long Way Baby
Earth Day has come a long way since then, but it’s still more about style than substance. They teach environmental science in high school now. The classes are long on making posters about the far-off promise of wind farms and convincing your Mom to change the light bulbs at home. People still gather to celebrate the Earth, but the crowds are considerably smaller and no one runs off to skinny dip in the Potomac. Poor Al Gore has risen above his former wooden self to make movies and start a television network, making him look marginally hip. He uses solar panels at his palatial farm and buys carbon credits to offset things like the pumps for the swimming pool, but the global warming naysayers are getting the last laughs as this Earth Day rolls around.

Today’s Earth Day is still more about picking up beach trash than solar energy or wind power, but everything starts small and takes awhile to catch on - although 38-years seems a little glacial even by American societal standards. Picking up beach trash is better than nothing and a few Moms may have even been convinced to swap out the light bulbs (but only when the incandescents burn out). We still aren’t building houses out of car hoods or remembering that the Whole Earth Catalog turned into a middle-class chain of department stores. Earth Day isn’t dead, but it sure needs some life support.

Solar-powered life support, if we can manage it.

The Poobah is a featured contributor at Bring It On!