Putting Ideas into the Heads of Others

Finishing Elizabeth Wein's Rose Under Fire this morning brought a line from a fictional Soviet pilot and prisoner that resurrected a memory:

"When a person spends four months being interrogated by the enemy and is still alive at the end, the Soviet Union calls her a traitor, not a hero. No, thank you. I would rather hang myself than go home" (223).

I'd heard this before.

Two years ago I rode on a coach bus in the seat directly behind the driver. Driving overnight across most of the width of Pennsylvania, we made a few stops and I found opportunities to have a fragments of conversations with him--Ivan. When we shook hands, they were thick and rough like slate. 

At first, we talked about the weather and the Pennsylvania farmland. When we stopped for coffee and bathroom breaks, I dug for topics to talk about while Ivan smoked outside the idling bus. It was raw and damp for late September. The cigarettes looked tiny between his fingers.

The susurration of a plane, a glint of silver six miles above us, grabbed his attention while we small-talked about the upcoming game in California, Pennsylvania. His mustache was black. His eyes were black. The sockets around his eyes, also black. Through a thick, Russian accent, he asked questions about our sport, football, which he didn't understand, and he didn't take his eyes from the plane. 

I asked him how long he had driven coaches.

"Since Red Cross rescue me."

Ivan flew Crocodiles, the Mi-24 attack helicopter, during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. He was shot down by anticommunist guerrillas and rescued by the Red Cross. 

"Everyone go different direction. I go a few days. Mountain. Desert. Red Cross come this way. I go." He pointed ahead of himself as if remembering seeing the Red Cross trucks on the desert horizon. 

On the bus, I looked up everything he told me on my iPhone because he didn't use the words Crocodiles or Mi-24. He just said, "I fly helicopter. Like Apache." He laughed at the term "Crocodile" and wondered how I knew it. When I flashed the iPhone, he understood and settled in. He relaxed in the driver's seat and tilted his head back waiting for the next questions to come.

I quizzed him for hours during our ride. It was hard for him to speak back over his shoulder to me--sometimes because he had to focus on the road, other times he must have been focusing on the words and the images.

"In some way, I very lucky. In other way, no so much," he said.

Once he recovered, the Red Cross took Ivan to Canada because he could not be returned to Soviet hands; he admitted that he would have been executed since he was shot down in enemy territory. Leftover sentiment from World War II, no one was trusted. The Soviets feared any contact their soldiers might have with the enemy, so to avoid any chance of one of its sons turning against them, they were eliminated.  Surviving a crash or being taken prisoner was a certain death sentence Soviet soldiers knew upfront.

His family believed he was dead for a very long time. Years later, after the old ways were torn down, he was able to write home, but to that day we spoke on the bus he had not seen any of the family he left behind. His parents died having believed their son perished in Afghanistan.

Learning English by watching American cartoons, Ivan found work driving coach buses in North America with the help of the Red Cross. He's done it for the past thirty years.

He said, "I loved Tom & Jerry, but it took me three year to figure out no one speaking. I learn nothing, not anything, from Tom & Jerry, but I love them! Rocky Bullwinkle crazy too."

Because we had a lot of hours on the bus and he continued to engage my questions, I went deeper. I asked him if he missed home and if he was bitter. I asked what he wrote in that first letter home, and how he learned about his parents. I asked what he thought of the world today. He answered everything and never wavered, never rolled his eyes at me, never said a bad thing about anyone or anything that happened to him.

But he did say he didn't watch or read the news much anymore.

"Everyone lie," he said.

When Wein spoke last week about taking responsibility for your own actions it came with an additional note. Take responsibility for yourself "because we are all responsible for putting ideas into the heads of others. Especially writers."

But what truly blows me away is Wein's ability to find experiences, to dig for little truths, and to unearth stories needing to be told. I used to think that that was spectacularly hard. 

It isn't hard. The only difference between you and me and Wein, or Twain, or hell, even Mozart is that those people took the time to run their hands up and down the strings, or to listen, or to talk to people they've never met before. 

Whether we write or note, we all have stories alive in our life experience that should be told in some way. Maybe Ivan writes, maybe he doesn't. But he told me his story, and I shared a piece of it here.

Think of the countless fragments of stories shared with you. The stories "written" by others simply because they were alive and loving and struggling and everything that happens to human beings. How many of those little embers of stories inside of you, right now, right this second, are just begging for you to take the time to share it so that it might find a home--a bookshelf, a set of eyes, a young mind?

Whether we write or not, we are all responsible for putting ideas into the heads of others. What ideas will you put out there--to your kids, your family, your friends--the stranger who drives the bus or who sits next to you on the train? What ideas will you put into the minds of others in your next meeting or in line at the market?

Think about that.

Especially if you are a writer.

What the old-timers were about

Give your wife a bottle of wine, and you give her an hour's happiness. Teach her how to make wine at home, and you give her a lifetime of love to share with everyone.

For my wife's birthday, I bought us all of the tools to make our own wine at home. I could couch this colorfully, but the fact is, wine is a major food staple in our house.

We've been a little inspired and envious of my cousins Joanna and Jere who have made their own wine at home. They have hosted a yearly family reunion and an annual Christmas party for family and friends. Always, bottles of homemade wine and homemade limoncello come out. In their case, wine-making was a tradition where Joanne's father, Carmen, was the glue of the group of amateur vintners. Since he passed a few years ago, their group of men haven't gotten together to make any wine. As Jere told me at their Christmas party, "it's just not the same without Mr. P, but I do want to get back into doing it."

Karla and I told them that if they do, we'd love to come over and learn and do it with them.

Jere makes his wine straight from the grape, often driving down to the Italian market to buy cases of various varieties of grapes. Karla and I will be making it from a juice that comes packaged with the grape skins--so someone already did some of the messy work for us. We're trying a Malbec-Shiraz blend for our first batch. I can already see us keeping the production line going nonstop as it will take several months for this first batch to come together. We're hoping for homemade wine by August or September.

When I was a child living in South Philadelphia, our neighbor, Gino, made homemade wine in his basement. Row homes in cities have thin walls. On one side of the house we could hear the other neighbors, Teddy and Kay, fight like vicious cats and dogs. Actually, they were my first education in spousal abuse and alcoholism. Kay stabbed Teddy during violent episode. As little boys, my friends and I gathered around the trail of dark, dried blood that had drizzled along the cement sidewalks and led all the way down the street into another neighborhood. Through the other wall was Gino's house where the strong, pungent aroma of wine going to bottle permeated the plaster between us and made breathing taste sour and bitter.

Yesterday, a brew shop owner, Paul, spent an hour talking me through the process. Patiently, he brought me into a little kitchen in the back of his shop and demonstrated how simply all of the apparatus worked. On a battered, long folding table near a line of sinks and an electric stove, plastic buckets of wine fermented. Along with the buckets, two huge, bulbous glass bottles, with stoppers the size of a child's fist, also fermented. He called them French fermenting bottles.

I love that one of the tools used in wine-making is called a "thief." It is combination dipstick and turkey baster. Paul used it to draw some wine out for testing--testing, not tasting. I'd love to know the story of coming up with the name--calling it a thief just smacks of wise guys in the old country.

Paul's heavy New York accent added instant authority to what he was telling me, but his passion for wine and family infused more excitement into something I look forward to sharing with my wife...and then everyone else in our lives. Paul shared that his grandfather made wine, his father made wine, and now he makes wine every week: "Everybody loves it. My daughters are always coming over, taking bottles home, my family, my extended family, my neighbors, they say all the time, 'Paul, or Dad, I'm just going to grab a bottle or two.' But that's ok. That's what the old-timers were about. That's really what all this is. You make it, you share it, you love."

I've got sunshine...

The underworld of the New York City subway is worthy of study.

Last weekend, I rode the subways from Grand Central into Brooklyn and then back again the next morning. Along the way, I experienced confusion switching trains as one of the lines was under construction.

Having grown up riding the subways of Philadelphia, I still find my brain addled by the New York subway. A friend advised me to take the R to Union Square and then the 6 to Grand Central, or switch from the R to the N at 59th or 36th. Except, when the trains arrived I didn't see Rs and Ns. I saw Ds and Qs and city employees told me it was ok--it would take me over the bridge.

I made it over the bridge each time, but along the way the subway culture vied for all of my senses. 

Did you know there are concerts at various subway stops beneath the earth? Enormous crowds gathered and watched dancers, bands, rappers, and performers of all sorts of novelty. And they were damn good.

Even with the clattering and shaking trains, the announcements of stops, and roar of trains flying past in the opposite directions, dozens of people of all ages slept peacefully. Heads back, mouth open, asleep. And then when the train stopped at their destination, up they popped and continued on their way through the doors.

Announcing himself as homeless, a man stood in the middle of the car and projected loud enough so everyone could hear. He would never beg for money, but would work for it. He said he hoped to bring us a small amount of joy on the way to our next stop, and then he looked down at a child and said, "Hello, gorgeous."

Bent forward with arthritis up and down his body, he must have been over 60 years old. But he sang "I got sunshine, on a cloudy day..." like a younger, happier man. He held his notes like The Temptations. Remarkable. That song in that moment from that man. Just simply remarkable. Several people pressed a few coins into the singer's palm and then he shuffled along to the next car.

Another man, who could have been in his 50s, had set up a small easel in the aisle and worked on a pastel from his seat. He was sketching an image from a newspaper; he kept pulling the paper (folded into a narrow strip) from inside his coat, up close to his face, and then dabbed a few colorful grease marks onto the paper, only to pull the paper out again moments later. He reminded me of the WWII veterans who drank in corner tap rooms on bright weekday afternoons.

Across from me, a man read Dust and Shadow: an account of the Ripper killings by Lyndsey Fey. He was old and frail and knock-kneed. On his left hand was his college ring. I imagined it was from City College. Noticing the library sticker on the spine, I envied that he had easy access to one of the greatest libraries. Like the artist just a few feet away, this man also held what he needed to see close to his face. His nose might have scraped the pages.

I wondered what I would do and who I would become without books. I wondered what would become of that man as he lost his physical capability to read.

These people were New York. They had a pulse. They had culture, history, and resilience. And they were comfortably at home in the underworld of the New York City subway.