Fences

FENCES

Michael Halfhill

All Rights Reserved © 2013 by Michael Halfhill

I don’t like fences. When I was a boy fences didn’t exist in my world. Birds, squirrels, bunnies, cats, and especially dogs went where they pleased. My dog’s name was Poochie. When school began each year I’d leave Poochie behind not thinking he might go away. Of course he always did. Looking back, I seemed to have had a different dog every spring, and each was of the free spirit variety, and I tagged them all with the same name—Poochie. When Poochie wasn’t wading in the treacherous Kanawha River, he was close by me seeking nothing more than a pat on the head, or an ear scratched. Like all the dogs in that town, Poochie was the offspring of some itinerant curbstone Casanova—no fancy bloodlines for me! From morning to dusk my Poochie and I would explore the narrow band of valley floor that separated the muddy Kanawha River from the green -forested mountains that towered over the little town where I grew up.

Every Sunday, Poochie would sit outside the church door yelping, and whining his belief in the absurdity of religion. An hour lost in prayer was a terrible waste when compared to frolicking in a place that had no fences. For a young boy, it was a broad world, a place where there were no fences.

I’m all grown up now. I live far away from the muddy Kanawha River and those green mountains, in a place that was once full of meadows and woods sliced open with thin lanes of shiny macadam.  When a deer died it was because it was hunting season.

Nowadays, big new houses that few can afford to furnish fill the meadows. Roads are crowded with telephone toting drivers, and the deer find their natural death beneath the wheels of oversized vehicles. Fences divide the ground with a surveyor’s precision and the world is hemmed in and narrow.

My dogs are elegant, purebred canines now. I’ve given them quirky names that make people smile. I have a fence to keep them penned up so they won’t run away when the weather gets cold and school children huddle together in the early morning mists.

I miss Poochie. I miss the time when there were no fences, and the world was broad.

How To Be A Gentleman

How To Be A Gentleman

How To Be A Gentleman: A Timely Guide to Timeless Manners



Print Length: 240 pages
Publisher: Thomas Melson; Rev Exp edition (April 8,2008)
Language: English

          Formats: Hard copy E-book              

           ISBN-10: 1401604730

           ISBN-13: 978-1401604738

             How does one become not just a man, but also a gentleman? Most men, myself included, generally fall into three classes; those who are gentlemen, those who think being a gentleman is a good thing, and those who regard gentlemen as relics from an antique age, like the ones portrayed on Masterpiece Theater. We live in an age where a house is not a home unless it has what is often referred to as, a ‘man cave’. The word cave says it all. Men, it’s time to send that leopard skin loincloth to the Goodwill. Put the baseball cap that hides your bald spot on the peg behind the bedroom door. Buy sandals, if you must go sockless, and leave the flip-flops in the shower stall where they belong. In short, step away from the tree and become a gentleman. But wearing pants that fit, or shoes that don’t make slapping noises when you walk down the street doesn’t make a gentleman—these make a neater, sexier looking guy. Gentlemen are very sexy, not only because they know what to wear, and wear it well, but also because they behave like guys who genuinely care about the other people around them. Someone once described a gentleman as one who is kind to others, even if they can be of no use to him. It may be true that all relationships are symbiotic, but a lack of symbiosis is never a reason to ignore the feelings of others.

And so now I come to this little book. How To Be A Gentleman: A Contemporary Guide to Common Courtesy by John Bridges, is a must read for any man, and the women and men who love him.  I recommend this guide be kept at hand at all times. Read it often. There are ten short chapters in this book. They deal with everything from checkout counter courtesy at the super market, to how to eat caviar when dining at the White House. My partner Peter, knowing how much I love caviar and how often I dine at the White House, gave me How To Be A Gentleman: A Contemporary Guide to Common Courtesy as a gift. The inscription dedicated to me on the flyleaf read, ‘Not because you need it, but because you can appreciate it (and it’s funny)’. Relieved, I scanned the book’s contents page. The first chapter immediately caught my eye because it deals with real life. Eagerly, I read its advice. ‘A gentleman never eats his lunch while he is behind the wheel of a vehicle.’ One would assume this is obvious, but apparently not.

This one is especially timely. ‘A gentleman does not assume it is the other person’s responsibility to provide the condoms.’ Bridges also says, ‘If a gentleman eats in bed, he always changes the sheets.’ Don’t even go there! J

How about, ‘A gentleman never adjusts his crotch in public.’ It’s true. One should never draw attention to one’s own shortcomings.

A gentleman never wears a hat, or cap while dining indoors.

A gentleman always waits for a woman to offer her hand before shaking hands. If she doesn’t offer, he doesn’t shake.

I’ll leave off here with a few more thoughts from John Bridges. ‘A gentleman never drinks a cocktail through a straw.

—A Gentleman does not turn down invitations. He never waits for something better to turn up.

—When a gentleman feels the urge to color his mustache, he shaves it off.

—A gentleman does not brag.’

And lastly, ‘In the morning a gentleman always offers to get up and make the coffee.’

For me, the take away is this word in the title—Courtesy, which is the ritual where a gentleman avoids making himself the center of attention at the expense of others.

So my dears, buy this book, read it, and most importantly, employ its advice. It couldn’t hurt. 

The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals

The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals
by Richard Plant

• ISBN-13: 9780805006001
• Publisher: Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• Pages: 272
• Paperback Only

Most people have heard of the infamous Nazi era Nuremberg Laws of 1935, even today, 78 years after the fact. Many of us, having seen the movie, Judgment At Nuremberg, featuring a grim and righteous Spencer Tracy as the chief judge, have come to believe that, after the crushing defeat of Germany and Nazism, those laws were repudiated and repealed.  Many of us, perhaps most of us, are unaware that paragraph 175 held within the Nuremberg Laws, criminalizing and setting out penalties for simply being homosexual, were still on the books, and being enforced until its repeal in 1969. So why was this particular law left unaltered after the world had rid itself of ‘Herr Hitler and his gang of desperados’*? Richard Plant in The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals, explains it thus. ‘One can only conclude that, for most historians, there was, and still is a taboo [exploring male / male sexuality], in effect. The territory of gay history is strewn with such taboos. This book seeks to end the silence toward the fate of homosexuals under the Third Reich.’

Richard Plant eluded being ensnared in the maw of the Gestapo; accidentally it seems, by enrolling as a student in neutral Switzerland. Many of his gay friends and acquaintances were not so fortunate. Plant’s personal reminiscences are drawn from letters and cards he received from Germany during the war, as well as his detailing his quest for the truth at the war's end. For the most part, the bulk of The Pink Triangle does not delve into the atrocities meted out, and meticulously documented by the men of the swastika. Rather, Plant explores the paradox of the fascination and simultaneous revulsion for gays, felt by the chief of the Gestapo—Heinrich Himmler. More than Hitler, Himmler was the driver of hatred against gay men, one hundred thousand of whom were arrested. Of those, five to fifteen thousand ended their lives in unspeakable terror at the hands of their Nazi oppressors.

This book’s most gripping parts are Plant’s prologue (prelude) and the epilogue, which is his personal first hand account of his life, during and after the war. These, I found fascinating  and at the same time, heart rending.

Plant leaves off with this observation, ‘Today, hindsight enables historians more clearly to assess the successes and failures of the Nazi regime’s policies. But the distance of time and professional ‘objectivity’ has by no means resolved the riddle of the Third Reich. The crimes, committed, and crimes planned, were so unspeakably monstrous that the human mind fails to apprehend their full dimensions. What happened is known; the question of why it happened remains unanswered.’

So by now you're wondering, why you should read this unhappy account of a history all too familiar. The answer is simple: Lest we forget.

The Pink Triangle is out of print, however,  new copies are available through e-tailers for under $6 US 

* Winston Churchill in his Memoirs of the Second World War

The Boys In The Bars

The Boys In The Bars
by Christopher Davis

Paperback: 216 pages

• Publisher: Knights Pr (May 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 091517538X
• ISBN-13: 978-0915175383
• E-book: No

The Boys In The Bars by Christopher Davis is a collection of short, and not so short stories that for the most part take place in pre-AIDS America. My first introduction to the writing of Christopher Davis was Joseph And The Old Man, which I reviewed earlier on this blog. The stories in The Boys In The Bars focus primarily on love, the search for love, the getting, or almost getting of love, and the loss of love. These are situations we all experience in some way, each different, each compelling, each a thread woven into the fabric of our lives. This book is a serious work. The writing, which I confess to envy, is compact. Davis uses simple, yet elegant phrases to describe complex emotions.

In Kaleidoscope he writes about the loss of love. ‘The bed was mine and he had left it. He left a large photograph of himself propped against the pillows. He was naked in it, and he looked very good. I looked closely at it and I remembered when we had first met and then I held it against my cheek and cried.’ In two sentences Christopher Davis admits loss and hints too of a love that is safe in memory.

In Fireflies, Davis touches on the loss of a loved one through AIDS. ‘…I learned how to live alone, how to know that there would be no one else there when I went to sleep, or when I woke up, how to live with silence, how to shop, how to cook for one, how to depend on television for companionship.’

History is the longest of the stories and it deals with AIDS before it had a name. ‘We were still young then, my friends and I…. We lived for fun, for sex…. We are old now, Danny and I. Survivors, as many gay men over sixty-five are now called. Most of us are gone…. But there are the young—God bless the young—and they are open and strong and confident, and when they read the histories of our youth and the neglect that accompanied the early years… they anger and they promise the world that it will never happen again. God bless the young.’

I said before this book is a serious work. Davis explores the nerve centers of our being in a way that deserves to be read.
The Boys In The Bars is out of print but good clean copies can be purchased online for less than 10 US dollars.