Pieces of Me: Short Essays About Life

By Dr. Gerard Brooker

I still think of him, even now a lifetime later. I sometimes wonder where he is and if he is happy. Or dead. I wish I could take back the day. To speak with him as I would now. And to call him by the name his mother gave to him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514435649

Dr. Gerard Brooker

Gerard Brooker has written essays for many magazines and newspapers, and has traveled to all seven continents. He has initiated several international peace and development conferences, and has been interviewed on the Bill Moyers’ Show. He was inducted into the National Teachers Hall of Fame in 1998 and has received awards and honorary degrees for his efforts on behalf of the needy. Dr. Brooker lives in Bethel, Connecticut, on an animal sanctuary with his wife, Sheila.

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Copyright © 2015 by Dr. Gerard Brooker.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015920752

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5144-3566-3

               Softcover        978-1-5144-3565-6

               eBook             978-1-5144-3564-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 01/18/2016

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Contents

Introduction

Sometimes It’s Better To Say Nothing

Uncle Bernie and the Missing Turtle

My Left Carotid Artery Is Missing

In The Gas Chamber At Auschwitz

Bathing In a Sea Of Humanity

November 22, 2014

Trying To Find His Humanity In Jordan

Letter To God About the Twenty Sandy Hook Babies

Faces I Cannot Comprehend

Holding Baby Jesus

The Twenty Pound Lobster: Catch of a Lifetime

Gift of a Lifetime

The Teachers of Sandy Hook

Pope Francis, Please Listen

My First Cigarette

Don’t Fall Off The Beach

About Dropping The Atomic Bombs On Japan

Fifty Thousand Dollars Worth of Lobsters

My Wife, the Cat Whisperer

Metaphors in the Supermarket

I Received a Letter Today

Saving a Drowning Flea

Fluffing in the Wind

Where Are They Now?

Meeting Sammy Davis

Natasha’s Odd Ambition

One Horny Softball Day

Chloe, the Kneady Kitty

There Are Days When We Cannot Miss

The Aura of Who We Are

The Exception

Cuddling a Rabbit

Perfect Measurements

Little Boy Nerd

The Red Shoes and a Bolt of Lightning

It Is What It Is

The Fly in Room 106

The Sweet Lady in CVS

Yikes: a Lunar Moth Flapping

In Praise of War?

A Trip To the Gas Chambers

The Value of Hustle

The Last Piece of Dessert

Ooh LaLa: The French and Civil War Surgery

The Children of Anse-a-Galet

The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Smiling

Could It Simply Be Luck?

Honorary Iwo Jima Marine

The Government Needs Poverty

You’re An Owl, He Said

I Cannot Always Grasp Beauty

Pimping Toothpaste On T.V.

Laughing Baby

The Happy House Sparrow

Heart, Heart, Heart

The Power of Symbols

I Think I Will Never Find the Answer

It Is Jan. 9, 2015, a Day of Hope

Today’s 10 O’Clock News

Is This Prejudice?

Pope Francis and Dogs

How Easily the Crowd Forgives

They Wouldn’t Let Me Bury Part of My Eye

Beetles in Our Bedroom

So You Want Jihad?

Telling Time

The Garbage Man of Irbid

Max Scherzer and the Signs of Demise

When the Great Ones Die

Every Dog Has Its Day

Overheard On A College Campus

Making a Promise at the Garden of Gethsemane

The Death of Mr. Stubbs, the Monkey

The Individuation of Birds

Why Not a Postage Stamp For Coal Miners?

The Pull Towards Life and Death

Kenny’s Ring

Touched By A Cat

The Day the Earth Trembled

God’s Re-Education Camp

A French Brushoff at Charles de Gaulle

Rembrant Oversees Our Wedding Vows

What About Ants?

A Letter From Verdun

A Dad’s Gift

The Sock and The Rock

How a Little Prince Changed My Life

With My Greatest Sympathy

Annabelle Talks

The Day I Shot Myself in the Foot

A Confidence Builder

The Little Tree That Could

The Ice Cream Parlor

Do You Ever Wonder About The Zigs and The Zags?

For the First Time, He Heard His Father’s Voice

Walking Over Dead Men

Expressions of Love

A Visit From Morgan the Mouse

Some Thoughts About Miracles

No Greater Love: the Re-Burial of Lt. Alexander Bonnyman

Becky’s Hands

New Guinea Mummy: Be Careful What You Ask For

My Closet Door Is More Than a Door

A WW I Diary: One of the Lucky Ones

The Ant and The Hiroshima Shadow Man

Our Fifteen Minutes of Fame?

To Be A Bird

Is The Selfie Symptomatic?

The Telegram

American Television: a Dark Place

A Different Kind of Psychopath

The Miracle of Heart Conduction

Admiring His Courage, Not His Deeds

Our Fascinating Brains

My Dog Kiki Taught Me About Love

Guns: An Ideological Revolution?

The Day Our Hutch Was Exploded By Psychic Power

Hoping My Team Loses

A Man Named Bangs

I’m a Male Prostitute, He Answered

Katrina Memories

Music in the Leaves

So This Is How You Pray

A Freudian Take On Birds

Do You Ever Wonder?

From Goodness, Truth and Beauty to Psychopath

The U.S. Economy: Depressed and Compressed

The Little Girl of Mafraq City

The Day That Changed My Life

DEDICATION

To Monsignor Peter A. Kelaher who paid for me, a boy from poverty, to go to a private boys’ high school. It was an act of generosity that changed the the course of my life.

And to the Congregation of Christian Brothers, and Iona College, who taught me how to be a good man in a difficult world.

Introduction

The short essays here are based on my life experiences. Some of them are plain quirky and amusing, others painful or ridiculous. Many spring in a high arc from a generative notion into the transformations of my imagination. And so, I like to think of these pieces as Imaginative Realism.

Sometimes It’s Better To Say Nothing

The time was about 9 p.m. many years ago, the place Emporia, Kansas. I was giving a speech called Chuck and the audience was filled with academics.

I must first tell you something. You see, I have this thought about philosophers, diplomats, politicians and, yes, academics. They use fancy words, big words, the kind you need a dictionary in your lap to figure out what they are saying. In a nutshell, their words cover the blood. I cannot get from them the naked, hard truth about life – the ups and downs, joys and sorrows. What I get is blah, blah, blah.

On the night I was giving the speech in Kansas, I was fairly young and still had not come to terms about the blah, blah, blah. I was trying to be one of them, hoping I could impress them. Yes, I was trying to look good, so I set out to use their kind of words. I would be the dictionary guy.

For about ten minutes I was going along fine about Chuck, a talented young student of mine who died young. I declared to myself that I was looking good when I became aware of my hypocrisy. Suddenly, I couldn’t remember anything. I went blank. In the quiet of my own nothingness, I looked at their faces. Probably fifteen seconds went by, though it seemed like fifteen minutes. Just as suddenly as the neural button of my brain had hit off, it clicked back on. I finished my talk. The applause was friendly, though unrevealing. I was embarrassed about the part where I went blank. Later, I asked my wife what she thought. The pause was brilliant, she said. Yes, I thought, sometimes it is better to say nothing.

Uncle Bernie and the Missing Turtle

I’ve read accounts about men who were gassed during WW I, and I actually knew one when I met my Uncle Bernie when I was twelve years old. My mother liked to take a few of us kids on Fridays evenings to visit one of our relatives we called Aunt Priscilla. We would walk to her apartment, because there weren’t any busses to her neighborhood and because we didn’t have any discretionary money to spend on bus fares, especially when we could walk to wherever we were going.

I remember going to Aunt Priscilla’s place many times before Bernie showed up one Friday night. I don’t now if he was our uncle, but we called him that. I don’t even know if Aunt Priscilla was our aunt. I don’t even know why he was there.

On the evening of Bernie’s coming out party, he beckoned us kids to follow him into the living room where he sat on a high chair before asking us to sit on the floor in front of him. He told us stories, many of them featuring a medium sized turtle that he would hold in his hand and pet its shell. I remember always wanting to say, Uncle Bernie, don’t you know that it can’t feel you petting it? Something inside me told me not to say these words. I wanted the turtle to feel through its shell and I wanted Uncle Bernie to rise above the rules of impenetrability.

Besides, he was a bit scary. Not in the conventional sense of a Halloween movie, but he had just enough odd behaviors to warrant scary to a bunch of kids. He always wore a fedora inside, for instance. And he would take time out in the middle of telling a story to puff-puff on his unlit pipe while making long and cooing sounds, as we giggled. And the scarf around his neck with knee-high knickers seemed weird to us.

His stories pulled us in like little bits and pieces of iron drawn to a magnet with a turtle in its hand. He once told us the story of how he was gassed in a trench in France. He told it in a way that was so powerful that I swear I could smell the gas in the room. I asked my mom about the story. Her explanation about gassing in war was a revelation about the world and how Uncle Bernie got to be the way he was, for me a loveable old man who told great stories and loved his turtle.

The river moved on and Bernie faded from our lives. My last memory of him was the night he gathered us in front of his high chair to tell us that his turtle had disappeared, and would we help him find it. He nearly cried, I could tell. We looked everywhere, under every rug and bureau, every bed and couch. We even interrupted the adults in the kitchen who were drinking their beer and telling their own stories, each one of us hoping to be the Golden One who would find the turtle and bring joy once again to Bernie. No one found the turtle. A few things died inside of me that night. I think, too, that the turtle had died, and that Bernie did not have the heart to tell us.

My Left Carotid Artery Is Missing

Now, I’m not a doctor, so what do I know! What I know is that a few years ago while playing in an Over 50 basketball league, I began to suffer blackouts in my right eye, especially after taking a strenuous shot. They were not frequent, nor did they last for more than a few seconds. None of the other players knew, as I would just slow down my pace, the usual way a player catches his breath on the court.

After a few years of this, I told my wife who prompted me to see a doctor. They did every possible test on me, and could not find a problem. What they did find is what they couldn’t find, my left carotid artery. So they sent me to the leading neurologist in the area. He looked over the cd, X-rays and scans, tapped me on my knees with a little rubber mallet, and did a few more ritualistic manual tests to see if I was functioning.

Mr. Brooker, we cannot find your left carotid artery. Try that one on! Where did it go? Really, though, I wasn’t upset. If I had lasted this long with one carotid artery, I probably would go on until whatever else would end my life.

Odds are that you should have been born dead, or severely defective. Apparently, your body developed a packet of blood vessels that linked your heart to the brain. In effect, it took the place of the artery.

I was curious. Is there any upside to this? I asked. No, he said. The deadpan expression on his face indicated that I might be wasting his time. I thought I might be the next Einstein, I said half seriously.

Is there a downside? I don’t know if he was, too, half serious in answering my question or if he just wanted to get on with his busy life. If you ever have a stroke on that side, you don’t have a backup system, whatever the hell that means. No matter.

What does matter is that I’m grateful that I am alive at all. I have received a most precious gift, life. In my case, truly a miracle.

I do not think about this condition of my body. I do, though, sometimes think about the day in grammar school when the health teacher was annoyed at me because I could not find my left carotid artery during her little find the artery routine. You know, the one where you put your right middle finger to the left side of your neck to feel the beat. I could not find it. Do it right, she would plead. Can’t find it, I’d answer.

You’re not doing it right, she said.

In The Gas Chamber At Auschwitz

When I entered one of the small reconstructed gas chambers at Auschwitz, more than a half century had gone by since the seven chambers were last used and subsequently destroyed by the Nazis near the end of the war.

As the door clanged shut behind our small group, I felt a bit dizzy, as I do now writing about that day. I think my mind was trying to shut down from the reality of it all.

It just wanted to go on Off mode. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to face the horror of the Holocaust, or the anger. I think it was the bewilderment I was facing as I stood in that gas chamber, that killing room.

I have written three historical fiction books about the Holocaust and its consequences. The writing was my personal attempt to give it some meaning. I thought that the more I knew about it,