Survival, Rand, and Mahler

I was never really suited to military service. But in 1963 there were few options. I had turned 20 and the draft was inevitable, although I hadn’t received my draft notice yet. I had been kicked out of college for bad grades and been working at various jobs for a year. I was definitely at a dead end in my life. To avoid serving in the Army, which meant Vietnam, I joined the Navy.

After a checkered first year or so (you can read about that in earlier blogs, starting with http://garysworldinwords.blogspot.com/2017/07/half-century-later.html), I ended up on a ship, the USS Galveston. I wasn’t suited for shipboard life either. I wasn’t sure I would survive in one piece. And then one day I was in a book store and I saw a title that I thought perfectly described me: For the New Intellectual by Ayn Rand (intellectual humility was never a strong suit of mine). I snatched it up and before I knew it, I was a devoted adherent of “objectivism,” as Rand called her philosophy. I read everything else I could find by her, including subscribing to her magazine, The Objectivist Newsletter.

I look back on my being suckered into that deeply flawed philosophy* with some embarrassment now. But if truth be told, the self confidence that Rand’s “virtue of selfishness” gave me helped me survive my shipboard years, even if that confidence was built on very shaky ground.

But I was also “saved” in those dark days by Mahler’s First Symphony, the “Titan.” I don’t remember when I first heard the Mahler First, but it has long been a favorite. During those troubling, for me, times on the ship, which was homeported in San Diego, I would go almost every weekend to the San Diego Public Library. In those days, before CDs and iTunes, one listened to records, as we quaintly called them. The library had listening rooms. I would take the LP (I preferred the Eugene Ormandy version) into the listening room. While still a music major before the Navy, I had studied conducting, so I would also grab the score from the library’s extensive collection and take that into the listening booth also. I would listen over and over to this dynamic piece of music, often “conducting” with my hand or a pencil. No doubt I presented an odd picture through the glass door of the listening booth.

That music, mixed up in an odd sort of way with the philosophy of Ayn Rand, helped me navigate the final few years of my Navy experience. I left the philosophy behind long years ago, but the Mahler First is still a magnificent piece of music which I often return to.

*There are many sources online that explain the flaws in Objectivism; here is just one:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/top-10-reasons-ayn-rand-was-dead-wrong/

Spring in Texas

I’ve been gone from Texas for almost eleven years now, and I haven’t really missed it much. Family and friends, of course, but little else. I hated the heat; and I hated the conservative mindset so common there. In almost all ways I’m glad I left Texas for Chicago.

But there is one thing I miss about Texas: the bluebonnets. Other spring flowers are, of course, beautiful, but it’s the bluebonnets that I remember most vividly. There would be whole fields of them, sometimes mixed up, as in the photo, with Indian paintbrush. Sometimes there are patches of what I call LYFs--little yellow flowers--intermingled. LYF? Hey, I was an English teacher, not a botanist.

Go to Google images and you can see many photos of the bluebonnets. Around the area where I lived there would often be large fields of flowers sometimes with deer. As I remember, the bluebonnets only grew in Central Texas, about from Waco to Austin; I lived 20 miles east of the midpoint between the two, more or less, and there were always fields of bluebonnets. It made the upcoming high heat of summer almost bearable.

There is a common misconception about picking bluebonnets: it’s against the law. That’s not true, at least not entirely true: From 1933 to 1973, it really was illegal in Texas to pick bluebonnets. Until 1973, a law originally nicknamed The Wild Flower Protection Act, levied a fine of $1 to $10 against anyone who set out to “pick, pull, pull up, tear up, dig up, cut, break, injure, burn or destroy” bluebonnets or any plants in public parks or on private property. State Rep. Ben Vaughan (D-Greenville) complained the bill made it illegal for a child to pick a flower for a teacher: “The bees are liable to be arrested for sucking the honey out of the wildflowers.” Cooler heads eventually won out and it is now okay to pick bluebonnets—although it’s still illegal in state parks and on private property. (This information thanks to the Ft. Worth Star Telegram).

The state government has seeded many of the rights-of-way alongside the highway; just driving around Central Texas in April is a treat; see the image below.

I miss spring in Texas, but I have many grand memories and there are always places to find images. Not that an image of a field of bluebonnets is anywhere near the real thing.

And Now the Countries...

A couple of blogs ago I wrote about the continents I had visited; there are four, if I fudge just a bit on South America. I thought today I would look at the countries within those continents I have been to. And a bit of fudging may be in order again. But more on that later.

Starting with this hemisphere: obviously the United States. But I’ve also been to Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Panama.

Going east, I’ve been to these countries, thanks to the U.S. Navy: The Philippines and Japan for sure. And now for the bit of fudging: I never actually touched the soil of Vietnam; however, I spend six months on a ship off the coast, mostly hunkered down in Damage Control Central, while the Galveston’s 6-inch guns hammered Vietnam. We did pull into Da Nang Port once, so our admiral could meet up with other muckity-mucks. But I didn’t leave the ship. So, do I count Vietnam or not? Hey, six months looking at the country ought to qualify, so I think I’ll count it.

Heading in the other direction, I have visited these countries compliments of the Navy: Majorca (which Wiki tells me is part of Spain); Italy, Sicily, mainland Spain, France, Malta, and Crete.

The count is now up to 13 (or 14—see paragraph three).

On later trips to Europe on my own, I visited these countries: Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Croatia, Greece, and Luxembourg. On these trips I revisited many of the countries I had been to before, but in terms of the count, I won’t duplicate them.

So, the final count: 20 (or 21—see paragraph three). That’s not bad for 75 years. And I hope there are a few more in the future!