An interactive Google Maps tour of Branch Street, Arroyo Grande, California–my home town.

https://www.historicbranchstreetarroyogrande.com/

It sounds so pretentious–for an Arroyo Grande boy, raised with heifers and chickens—a little boy so sheltered that he was almost overcome by the velvet-suited Santa on the mezzanine of Riley’s Department Store in San Luis Obispo, California–but I miss Paris.

I didn’t get it the first time I took my students to the great city. I think I was overwhelmed. The second time, with my literature teaching partner, Amber Derbidge, and our wonderful Breton tour guide, Freddy, I got it.

It helped, I think, that we’d came south from Anne Frank’s Amsterdam, then through the Ardennes, and finally across Northern France–a stretch of the trip that had begun at Metz, where we saw trout feeding, describing ringlets on the surface of the Moselle, just like the ones I’d tried so hard to catch in the Arroyo Grande Creek when I was little.

At Verdun, a museum guide took me aside and whispered “Your students are so respectful,” which might just be one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received, because she confirmed to me that they’d learned, in our classroom, what I’d taught them about Verdun.

We were greeted, in fact, with immense kindness. At Reims—I’d used, early in our school year, both Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan and Shakespeare’s Henry V to teach my students the meaning of nationalism —a local woman, delighted to meet young Americans, insisted on giving us a tour of the cathedral, one that wasn’t on our schedule.

We didn’t mind because she was so happy and she made us happy, too. It was Rockefeller Foundation money that was helping to repair shell damage to the cathedral facade from the Great War, and even though none of us could be mistaken for a Rockefeller, the important part, for this lovely woman, was that we were Americans.

We reached the coast and the D-Day beaches and the American Cemetery above Colleville-sur-Mer, where we found a local farmworker, Domingo Martinez, a Mexican-American, a member of the 79th Infantry Division, who was killed by fragments from a German .88 shell near Le Bot in July 1944.

Then, after the cruelty of the battlefields, we ended this trip in Paris. This time I realized how alive Paris is. I got it. I was as enchanted as a Nebraska farm boy—not that far a remove from my actual childhood near the farm fields that border the coast of central California—and when I briefly got lost in the Latin Quarter, I was unafraid. There was far too much for me to explore. I would get back to my students. Eventually.

In the classroom, I used to share the video below with my students to introduce them to my favorite unit—Nineteenth Century urban history, or La Belle Epoque—and they, and I, needed the sustenance we got here, in this chapter, if we were to survive the heartbreak of the First World War.

This year, another heartbreak—another disaster, this time in Covid—has forced the cancellation of the Eiffel Tower’s spectacular fireworks show.

So this blog post is a very little attempt to make up for what we’ll miss this New Year’s Eve. It’s one of several love letters I’ve written to Paris, where my father, an American GI—he spent two years away from my Irish-American Mom, seen here with my big sister—was a tourist in the late fall of 1944.

To teach what I feel to my students, I made this video for them. It’s oddly matched to an oddly beautiful song, “Bittersweet Symphony,” by The Verve, a song that in its own way, is a kind of masterpiece.

Joyeux Noel, my friends.

https://videopress.com/v/CP5FRbU8?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata

As you probably know, I have two nieces who are extraordinary. Rebecca, the younger sister, is a poet who chains words together, in meticulous lines, that seemingly don’t belong together (something I love to do), but in the strength of her writing—novel, original, but unpretentious—you suddenly, intuitively, delightfully, understand. Then the poem shimmers on the page.

Emily is a writer, too, but she’s taken the path of acting—in New York City, of all places—and while Becky’s poetry makes me sing little songs inside, with her providing the lyrics, I don’t get to see Emmy’s craft because she’s so far away.

Until I found a sample of it online in this video excerpt. I hope Emily forgives me, but I found bit of monologue so stunning—so oddly and happily humbling— that I wanted to set it down so I would never lose it.

And what I will never lose, either, in the immense pride I feel in my nieces, is the presence of my mother, whom I see in them, down to their naturally curly hair. Even more, and even more happily, I see the presence of my sister Sally. She was the last of the four of us, born when my Mom was 41, so she was kind of miraculous to us.

Her daughters, Emily and Rebecca, have only confirmed the miracle. They are Sally’s gift, and her husband, Rick’s, gift to us.

They are a reminder that the integrity of our family, in generations I’ve traced to the 11th Century, to churchyards in London and County Wicklow and Baden-Wurttemberg, has been made safe by a long line of remarkable mothers. Not a one was perfect. They were remarkable instead. They would instantly recognize Sally as one of their own. I can somehow see them gathering around her, some of them wrapped in warm Celtic tweed, all of them waiting happily for the chance to embrace the remarkable woman who was once upon a time my baby sister.

My earliest memory is typical of me and my inimitable physical grace: I fell down the steps of my grandparents’ home in Williams, Colusa County, and cut my knee open. I still have the scar. That was sixty-six years ago.

My Gramps, Grandpa Kelly, was once a Taft police officer. Some time in the 1940s, he was walking his beat, rattling storefront doorknobs to make sure they were locked, when he was jumped by three oilfield roughnecks waiting for him in an alley. Within about a minute, Gramps remained vertical while the roughnecks abruptly became horizontal.

But to us, Gramps was a gentle man–I once wrote that “he was able to talk whimsy with children unencumbered”– and I can still see the concern in his face. He scooped me up and held me in his arms until my Grandma Kelly, a pragmatic German-Irish woman, came out with the iodine, which probably made me shriek even louder.

But she’d saved me, too, just a little earlier. I was a baby in Taft when the Tehachapi earthquake hit in 1952; it was her turn to scoop me up. She sprinted into the street, clad only in her slip, which had come slightly disarrayed, and so my grandmother provided the neighborhood with a sight they could never unsee.

I adored my grandparents. And we all adored Gus, a gander, who followed us kids all around their almond ranch in Williams. I can’t quite remember him; I was pretty little.

(I don’t know quite why they called it a “ranch.” What do you say to almonds? “Hey! Giddyup, little almonds?” And what do you do with the “l” in “almonds?” Grandma Kelly and Gramps left it out.)

Anyway, Gus thought he was a Kelly, too, and since we were Kelly grandkids, he welcomed us into his flock, which consisted of one goose and three children.

I don’t have much experience with ganders, other than the ones at San Luis Obispo’s Laguna Lake, and they are obnoxious.

I do have a far richer experience with Thanksgiving turkeys. Both of my parents were marvelous cooks, and the only things better than their Thanksgiving turkeys (and Mom’s dressing) were the three days of leftovers that followed.

I loved Thanksgiving.

But I was maybe three years old when the best Thanksgiving ever was served up at my grandparents’ farmhouse–or ranch house–in Williams.

The turkey was moist and tender and a little sweet and my mother put her knife and fork down momentarily and told her mother, my Grandma Kelly, that this was the most extraordinary turkey she’d ever had in her life.

“Oh, honey!” Grandma replied. “This isn’t turkey. It’s Gus.”

Mom stared down at her knife and fork, which remained untouched, except for absently pushing around the peas and mashed potatoes into little hillocks and valleys, for the rest of the meal.

I think the other Gregorys pretty much concluded their meals, too, maybe except for me. I was too little to understand that the turkey that tasted so good was the fellow who’d walked so amiably beside me just a day or two he became the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving table.

My family talked about Gus the Goose for twenty years after that Thanksgiving. The pain in their voices as they told the story, every year, was palpable.

Someday, some Thanksgiving, since I taught “Scarlet Letter” for so many years at Mission Prep High School in San Luis Obispo, I might wear a scarlet “G” pinned to my shirt to the Thanksgiving meal. It would be the decent thing to do to atone for such a sinful sin.

Gus, I am so sorry.

A story—maybe a kind of Thanksgiving story— I learned while writing a book:

Henry Hall of Cayucos was a B-17 gunner in the 91st Bomb Group when, in March 1944 over Holland, his squadron was “bounced” by a dozen German fighters, Messerschmitt 109s.

It had been a hard day already; Hall had seen the landing gear of a bomber ahead lazily drop, the hydraulics destroyed by another fighter’s cannon fire, and then the plane began to tumble. While it was going in, it clipped two more B-17s and they went in, too. This combat footage gives the faintest sense of what young men like Hall endured.

Suddenly, a fighter like the one above—a P-47 Thunderbolt—appeared. Hall and his crew looked on, amazed, as the American fighter pilot flew into the swarm of German attackers.

This moment allowed the teenaged Henry Hall to live into great old age, to survive what the veterans of the 91st Bomb Group called “Black Monday.”

It was only later that he learned that the P-47 pilot had survived his mission, too. He shot down four of the fighters that had come after Henry Hall and his friends.

“Duty” must seem such a quaint word to the self-absorbed generations that have followed Hall’s. That generation fought for freedom, while modern Americans seem to fight for freedom from accountability. But the man who saved the young B-17 gunner’s life that day understood accountability. He understood his duty exactly.

The fighter pilot was the Good Shepherd, and on Monday, March 6, 1944, the 91st was his flock.

I’m a sucker for movies where the central character takes a moral stand and is pretty much destroyed by it (ask my former students about Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons). I was taken by James McAvoy’s portrayal of accused Lincoln conspirator Mary Surratt’s defense lawyer in The Conspirator, directed by Robert Redford, which was on this morning.

I don’t know much about McAvoy except you need to go immediately to the YouTube video where he plays a Scots air traffic controller on “Saturday Night Live.” It is a gem.

The lead actors, except for Robin Wright, were Scots, English and Irish. My hero among Lincoln actors is Daniel Day-Lewis, who now lives in County Wicklow, where my mother’s ancestors came from.

And they all have splendid American accents. You need to go immediately to the YouTube video where Irish young people try to speak in American accents. That’s a gem, too.

But the film reminded me of all the Lincoln assassination oddities. Here are a few:

–Booth shot Lincoln with a single-shot 44-cal. Deringer pistol. The pistol ball entered behind his left ear and lodged behind his right eye (sorry). It should have killed him instantly, but he lived for eight more hours. When doctors stripped him after laying him diagonally in a bed (he was too long for it) in a boarding house across from Ford’s Theater, they marveled at his musculature–he looked like a Greek statue. The year before, at City Point, Virginia, where an Arroyo Grande soldier served, Lincoln smilingly held an axe straight out from his body at arm’s length. None of the young sailors who served on the presidential steamer could duplicate the feat.

–Booth, from a family of acclaimed actors, was an exuberant sword-fighter in his Shakespeare plays who sometimes wounded his fellow actors. He leaped athletically from the Presidential booth at Ford’s, caught his boot-spur in a furled flag, and broke his leg when he landed on the stage. He exited like a crab. Good, because Booth remains in my top five for the biggest sonofabitches in American history. The actor, by the way, had fortified himself before the assassination with a few stiff drinks at The Star, a bar next to Ford’s. It probably didn’t register to him that the guy a few pairs of elbows down the same bar was Abraham Lincoln’s bodyguard.

–The Lincolns’ partners in the booth that night were a young army officer, Henry Rathbone, and his bride. Rathbone grabbed for Booth but the assassin laid his arm open with a dagger before that leap to the stage. Eighteen years after the assassination, Rathbone fatally shot his wife, Clara, and attempted to kill himself with a knife. He failed. In 1910, Rathbone’s son burned the dress his mother had worn the night of the assassination, thinking it had cursed the family.

–Booth timed his pistol shot for a moment in the play Our American Cousin, a comedy, when laughter would be at its peak. The last words the president heard were likely delivered to lead actress Laura Keene: “You sockodologizing old man-trap!” Keene made her way to the presidential box and cradled Lincoln’s head in her lap as he lay dying.

–Booth’s final words, after being shot in a tobacco barn lit afire by Union troops, were “Useless, useless.” He’d been paralyzed by the fatal shot, and asked a soldier to raise his arms so he could see his hands one more time. Booth was shot by a soldier named Boston Corbett, a hatter in civilian life. Corbett returned to the business after the war and became increasingly paranoid (mercury was the agent that made for Mad Hatters). He was involved in at least two pistol-brandishing incidents, including one when he was the doorkeeper for the Kansas House of Representatives. Corbett was eventually confined to an insane asylum. In 1888, he escaped on horseback. We’re not exactly sure what happened to him–he either lived out his life in Mexico or Minnesota.

–At the same time Lincoln was shot, Lewis Powell (also known as Lewis Paine), entered the home of Secretary of State William Seward, who was swathed in bandages and casts and helpless in his bed, the victim of a carriage accident. Powell, claiming to be a pharmacist’s errand-runner with a prescription for Seward, bolted upstairs and stabbed the helpless man repeatedly in the face and throat. Since Seward had fractured his jaw, a metal and canvas splint deflected most of the knife thrusts. Powell, thinking Seward dead, burst out of the home, shrieking “I’m mad!”

–Powell was hanged along with accused co-conspirators George Atzerodt, David Herold, and, despite James McAvoy’s best efforts, Mary Surratt. The photograph shows an umbrella shielding Mrs. Surratt from the hot sun just before the trap was sprung.

–The film suggests that Mary Surratt was bait, intended to lure her son, John, one of the conspirators, in to surrendering herself–a situation eerily similar to the execution of accused nuclear spy Ethel Rosenberg. She was indicted in what was an attempt to force her to testify against her husband Julius. Julius was almost certainly guilty of passing atomic bomb secrets on to the Soviets. Ethel wasn’t, and she was as strong as Lincoln–it took repeated jolts in the electric chair to kill her. John Surratt was almost certainly guilty. Mary probably wasn’t.  The film depicts a military tribunal that doomed her from the start.

–The Surratts were devout Catholics. In the years after the assassination, John emerged as a member of the Pontifical Zouaves, soldiers charged with defending the Papal States, then the target of Italian nationalists who would annex that territory to complete the unification of Italy in 1870.

–Mary Surratt’s boarding house, where the conspirators planned the assassination, is today an Asian restaurant/karaoke bar called Wok and Roll.

So it goes.