Our Journeys

By Jon G. Kirschner

Each of us is on a unique journey in space and time. Blending fiction with actual events and characters, this work explores the sometimes tragic - and at the same time heroic - journeys each of us makes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781728378596

Jon G. Kirschner

Born and raised in Syracuse, NY, Jon G. Kirschner served with the US Navy in Vietnam in 1966. He worked as a Production Foreman and Industrial Engineer in equipment manufacturing, and obtained a degree from Syracuse University in Literature and Creative Writing. Jon's career took him into government where he spent considerable time in the Washington, DC area working for the Department of Defense, and in Tokyo, Japan, where he managed technical assessment of manufacturers throughout the Pacific Rim. His last assignment for the Defense Contract Management Agency in Washington was as Agency Liaison to the US Navy. In addition to a career of writing technical documentation and policy for industry and government, Jon has continued to write fiction, poetry, social and political commentary. His first short story was published in 1970, and he has been featured as Guest Columnist for the St. Petersburg Times. Jon currently divides his time between Woodgate, in the Central Adirondack Region of New York, and Dunedin, along Florida's Gulf Coast.

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© 2023 Jon G. Kirschner. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/24/2023

ISBN: 978-1-7283-7860-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-7859-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023901681

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or

links contained in this book may have changed since publication and

may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those

of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher,

and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

For my daughters, Michelle, and Karin. I

gave you life, and you gave me joy.

I must thank Charlie Webb and Justin Lee, Jean Moreau and the crew of the Sturgeon Bay, for letting me share their journeys. Special thanks to Jerry and Scotty, Mr. Coleman, an unnamed police sergeant, and many others for sharing mine.

Contents

Introduction

Beyond this Future’s Hand

February Made Me Shiver

Fish-Eye World

On Station

The Sturgeon Bay

Keeping Warm

Washington D.C. Part One – The Old World

The Jocho Experience

Washington D.C. Part Two – History Takes a Turn

Apartment 4

Je suis ici, Mere Patrie

PAST THE STARS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Introduction

E ach of us is on a conscious journey through time and space. We share the ride with at least mammals, and maybe all living things with functioning brains. Awareness awakens like a pinball release. In a flash a story begins, a delicate desert flower unfolds. Rainforest trees send and receive messages on the wind and through intertwined root systems to reactively change their chemistry. Is it possible their spirit feels the warming sunshine and cooling rains?

Most stories hamster and human are harsh and short, flowers crushed and broken. If equality exists it’s in the flash of birth, because from then on the story is controlled by forces that challenge what genes have provided for. Some stories begin in poverty and anguish, and end too short right there. Few begin in fortunate times of great wealth and comfort. Even fewer are told a thousand times over by others and become legend. But, like the flowers, and the snowflakes that dance above them in the cold desert night air, no two are the same.

Beyond this Future’s Hand

Concrete walls like in a 50’s sci-fi picture stand

Gaunt dirty-white against a steel-gray sky.

We changed rocks to sand and built them up again,

Molded Bauhaus clean to reach that sky.

But there’s another time beyond this future’s hand,

Where reflecting glass blows down,

And windows gape in hollow horror,

The eyes of frightened death.

And the sky is mustard brown.

Reddened gates scream on rusted hinges,

Gathering windblown gifts of leaves and snow.

Fallen floors slide sideways

To the slippery streets below.

On an outward edge a jagged crack now grows

And from its widening mouth flow grains of sand.

Then the gale will try its willing hand.

And the doors and floors will flatten more,

Reaching for an angle of repose.

February Made Me Shiver

T his story is told with elements of racism, ignorance, and innocence. It wouldn’t be true to my recollections without them. Many lives have come and gone since the early 1960’s. Maybe today, those of us still living are closer to understanding, maybe not.

Today is the science fiction of my youth, but then it was only 1961. Unforeseen cultural upheaval in the next few years would be like shifting continental plates for all of America’s northern cities. That was yet to come. It would be another two years before I’d read Orwell’s 1984 and think how far into the future that was.

In 1961, Syracuse was a city of industry. A theater district, Hotel Syracuse, department stores, banks, and coffee shops were city center. High school kids sipped cokes and ate mountains of fries after school in the deli of Dey Brothers basement. It was all surrounded by loosely connected ethnic neighborhoods generations in the making. Buses moved everyone around.

West-Side Irish families controlled city hall, police, and fire stations throughout the city. North-Side Italians supplied the plumbers and carpenters that made up the construction trades. Jewish men took in the city’s refuse and recyclables from red brick buildings along West Street. They retreated to the hills around LeMoyne College, and down to the majestic homes along East Fayette Street. James Street, heading east out of town was a pearl. Victorian mansions defined the way into Eastwood.

Mothers left strollers unattended in the shade of Woolworth’s awning on Salina Street. Back then, when you left the village of Liverpool heading north to Oswego, you passed only farms for 20 miles. Other than isolated farming towns and villages, suburbia was yet to exist.

I delivered the Post Standard in the mornings and worked odd hours at the Blue Ribbon Dairy on South Avenue one or two nights a week, and one or both days on the weekend. Occasionally I’d deliver fliers for Fred Aboud’s Five-and-Dime store. We raked leaves in the fall and shoveled driveways and sidewalks in winter.

Every job has its benefits, and the dairy had several. Ice cream was one of them. Mr. Geiss had a half-dozen sons, each named after a disciple. The ones around my age and I got creative with the heavy green Oster blender that sat unmovable on a shelf above the coolers. We’d make its motor slow to a crawl mixing ever more exotic flavors of ice cream, soda, raw eggs, and heavy cream. We’d shut it off when the room filled with that burning-motor smell.

In between, one or more of the owner’s three teenage sons and I would wait on customers and stock the coolers and shelves of the store. Hundreds of gallons of cream-topped milk passed every night from coolers in the back, to coolers in the front, to customers who dangled them from sturdy plastic rings as they banged out the front door. We stocked bread and pastries, soda and candy. Half-a-dozen dairy trucks delivered to those who didn’t live close enough to dangle them home themselves. Every bottle of milk sold had an empty return that had to be dealt with as well. Floors had to be swept and mopped.

Most nights I’d have overdue and under-thought homework. If another of the brothers was near the front of the store, John and I would climb the creaking stairs to the old man’s big desk in the balcony front office. John would scrawl out answers in my Chemistry workbook that, according to Sister Agnes, I cared little about, and she was right.

Three or four times we swiped a gulp of Seven Crown from the amber-brown bottle Mr. Geiss kept in a desk drawer. An amount of water equal to our hurried slugs was measured and added each time. It took the old man about a month to figure it out. He came down red-faced and angry. The stairs cracked hard under his considerable weight. He poured the weakened and pale whisky-and-water into a glass to show us what someone had done.

Merrick Elementary School was across the street from the dairy, and on report card day every passing student got a free ice cream cone. We suspected some kids of coming back twice, but Mr. Geiss, who oversaw the process, never challenged any of them. Tiny scoops went out to babies in strollers. I don’t think a dime of profit ever came from the sale of ice cream.

Mr. Geiss tried his hand at being a used car dealer, so he paved the lot next door to the dairy and filled it with questionable vehicles way past their prime. Each had a price scrolled across its windshield and a cardboard sign that said Special Price on the dashboard. Shiny red, white, and blue plastic triangles now fluttered between two telephone poles along the sidewalk. Which brings me to the second advantage of being a dairy employee and part-time member of the Geiss family.

Transportation around the city was easy. In our teens we could walk, ride a bike, or take any city bus, day or night. My sister and I went to a downtown Catholic high school with kids from every part of the city, recently graduated from any of a dozen Catholic elementary schools from Valley Drive to Camillus. At sixteen every kid had a driver’s license.

So, the boys and I would slap a magnetic dealer plate on a car that would start, and take it for a joyride under the guise of some pretend school errand. Sometimes we’d drive to Kirk Park and play tennis on their near-perfect clay courts. Sometimes we drove to Jamesville for a swim by the tracks and ran into kids we knew from Elmwood. I drove for a year before a learners’ permit legally allowed the privilege. In the meantime, I learned to drive on cars with failing brakes, shiny-bald tires, slipping transmissions, and intermittent or nonexistent power steering. None of them had a spare tire or jack.

I had just under a hundred customers for morning paper delivery. By fifteen I was a pro. I started four years earlier, delivering half of another boy’s route for four dollars a week and a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes he’d steal from his mother’s dresser drawer.

When winter finally let go of the northeast, I’d sleep on the back porch. It was screened in, had a single fold-out bed, and was separated from the rest of the house by an old summer kitchen that was now mostly a storage and laundry-room. There was a tall 1930s radio that still worked and glowed yellow-orange after warming up its glass tubes. With a couple of unfolded coat hangers hooked up as a makeshift antenna it could reach out to Buffalo, Chicago, and Wheeling, West Virginia.

My wind-up alarm clock went off at quarter-to-five in the morning and no one in the house would hear it. On the porch I’d end the day with a cigarette, blowing the smoke through the screen to the crickets in the darkness. The window sill would fill with butts.

In summer months for maybe three years I met up with Sue whose backyard was only a fence or two away. We’d make out sometimes for hours, never touching off-limit body parts, but enjoying each other’s pheromones just the same. I was a Catholic school kid from the heart of downtown Syracuse, she a public school work in progress, so winter months we seldom connected. Once though, she invited me to a mostly Protestant public school make-out party in Elmwood. The girls seemed more interested than the Catholic ones I was used to. All the lights in the house were off, so it was easy to tell.

Anyhow, two or three bundles of freshly printed Post Standards were dropped on the corner of Belleview and South Avenue at about five in the morning. It was across the street from the phone booth that I used at night to call my school friends. My father didn’t allow the frivolous use of our home phone, so I always carried a pocketful of dimes.

I spent the next couple hours tossing the paper on neighborhood porches. Some had to be carefully folded and stuffed into mailboxes or behind screen doors. There was a tight fold for ones that were thrown from a moving bike or a dead run. In winter I dragged a sled behind me, in summer I walked or took my bike. Back to the kitchen by seven. For the effort, I earned ten dollars a week, sometimes twelve, after my bill was paid. It was nice to have money for fries and a couple of cokes after school.

Saturday morning was collection day and my pockets filled with sixties silver. The daily paper was sixty cents a week. After my circuit I’d dump the change onto the counter at any of the corner stores and change it for the weekly bill, just over fifty dollars. There’d be a round of sodas and Twinkies.

At the corner of Hudson Street and Tallman was the back-side of Otto’s bar, a grocery, and a meat market. Four wood-framed apartments tilted behind the slightly uphill, original stone structure. Two took the morning paper. I bounced up the stairs two at a time and rang the bell on Apartment 2. It belonged to a dark-haired woman, about fifty, who seemed always to be home and lived alone. The door creaked open.

Paperboy, I said with my usual responsive smile.

Sure she said, just a minute.

When she turned aside her silk robe opened and the shock of seeing a woman’s breasts for the first time in my life, in real life, not just in black-and-white art photos we found at a friend’s house, made me rock back on my heels and almost fall off the porch steps. They hung from her chest like the last two grapefruits in stretched-out five pound sacks. I was horrified. The vision was involuntarily burned onto my retinas.

She composed herself and started rifling through the junk on a table for a half-dollar and a dime, maybe an extra nickel for a tip. When she moved a bit to her left I could see through to the bedroom. A man was sitting on her rumpled bed. His skinny legs hung down and didn’t quite reach the floor. His dark comb-over hair was as rumpled as the sheets he was sitting on.

The shock of seeing the woman’s breasts was just wearing off (although it would invade my thoughts for years), when her guest’s identity was revealed to me. It was the police sergeant who visited south-side schools and lectured us on traffic safety every year. For just a second our eyes met in common recognition, then both of us looked away. He was the one who passed out the certificates we proudly accepted for our service as crossing guards all year in the rain and snow. Our moms stood watching with pride too. It was they who kept our mud-splattered belts bleach-white between laundry days. White belts hung by the oven to dry in hundreds of homes around the city.

I had only seen the sergeant in his neatly buttoned blue jacket and pants with the shining silver badge and polished holster and handcuffs tucked in his wide black leather belt. I’d never seen him without his blue hat with its matching silvery badge.

Need something Marge? he asked when he slid off the bed and reached for his pants. He was wearing black socks and his feet skidded just a bit when they made contact with the hardwood floor. His off-white boxer shorts and sleeveless undershirt didn’t hide the roundness in his middle.

No, she said, It’s only the paperboy.

My father insisted that half of what I earned be put into a savings account, so I’d ride my bike to Onondaga Savings Bank on South Salina Street and deposit ten or fifteen dollars at a time, which seemed always to earn five percent interest. The teller’s adding machine crunched down on the pages of my passbook, crunching one extra time for interest every three months. By sixteen I amassed over six hundred dollars in that little cardboard and paper book. From fourteen on, my sister and I bought our own clothes except for the usual underwear, socks, and pajamas we’d get at Christmas and birthdays.

I bought the best bike Sears had to offer. Sears and Roebuck towered proudly across the street from the bank. It was where we bought everything from jewelry and clothing to nails and paint. After I handed the salesman two neatly folded ten dollar bills, he looked up my parents’ account, and allowed me to pay the balance of just over forty dollars at five dollars every two weeks, under my own account number, until it was truly mine.

I knew almost everyone within a ten square block area of Syracuse’s south side. I used shortcuts through back yards, along Onondaga Creek, and between commercial buildings and businesses for two miles in any direction. There were a dozen drug stores with soda fountains, and more corner grocery stores. Sprinkled every few blocks were tailor shops, barbers, and neighborhood bars.

Just a few years earlier bars had the only televisions, and whole neighborhoods gathered there for presidential elections, important speeches, and shadowy Friday night boxing matches. Now there was talk of adding a third channel and most everyone had their own TV flickering through the living-room drapes at night. In the fall of 1963 that was how America went through the death of a president, sharing the birth of a new common solitude.

In the morning you could smell breakfast cooking and coffee brewing in almost every home, and in the evenings you could identify the ethnic origins of every household by the odors emanating from open doors and windows. Porches and windows displayed flower boxes in summer. We were neither rich nor poor. People were proud to be called working-class.

Men went off to any one of two dozen sprawling manufacturing facilities around Syracuse. They produced the cars and televisions, the washing machines and typewriters, the pieces and parts that kept American products flowing around the world. Everything, from fine china to silverware to pots and pans, was produced within a hundred miles of Syracuse. The washing machine and air-conditioning businesses were booming equal to a population that demanded even more products, schools, and roads.

The women that I knew, for the most part, shopped and cleaned and baked bread and tended to the chicken-pox or the upset stomach that kept a child at home from school for a day or two. That’s not to say women didn’t teach a growing generation, or tend to wounds, or keep the factories running. A thousand women built televisions at General Electric alone. Most of them were building tanks to support a war fifteen or so years earlier.

My first twelve years were spent in the big corner house at Clover Street and South Avenue. It was built in the mid-1860s as a single family home in a post-Civil War boom. Over subsequent and more austere decades and housing shortages, it slowly morphed into four apartments. The house had been in the family for a couple of generations. We shared it with my father’s brother and his family, and his cousin and family. All three households were somewhat dysfunctional. Except for my mother, all the adults in the house smoked and consumed a lot of alcohol. Arguing and crying echoed through the walls and floors at night.

The smallest apartment, a studio in the upstairs front, was rented by the week and had various colorful characters as tenants throughout the years. One of them, an auto mechanic, used to give me patiently assembled airplane models, complete with every decal. I hung them from my bedroom ceiling with scotch tape and string. He also provided me with stacks of strange horror-filled comic books that I spent hours reading. My mother never caught on to the clawing blood-soaked mummies and terrified young maidens that ran across their covers. The word Bizarre was usually scrawled somewhere on the front page in electrified white lettering.

A hundred year old house the size of ours needed constant attention. Routine maintenance was ignored for a generation before my parents bought it from my Grandmother and a Great Aunt, her sister. Most of my father’s off-work hours were spent repairing and painting the thirty-foot tall exterior, and the twenty rooms it contained. Everyone in the family got involved in some way. My mother would carry gallons of paint and brushes and rollers across the Sears parking lot to the only space left in the back row. My father, always the project foreman, would yell down from a ladder for me to run to the basement and fetch him a bucket of nails, a pair of pliers, or some exotically named tool I could never find.

My parents’ retirement plan was set in motion with their purchase of the single-family house next door with a cool back porch. It belonged to an elderly couple for fifty years. Every tree and bush and flower garden had been in place for decades. Hollyhocks drawing in fat round bumble bees grew tall along the driveway every spring. Mr. Watkins died, and Mrs. Watkins wanted to move nearer to her sister, just north of Binghamton. There were no lawyers or banks involved in the transaction. Something got notarized or stamped at the courthouse. She held the mortgage, and a check went out to