The Time Of The Monkey, Rooster, And Dog

The Time of the Monkey, Rooster, and Dog

iUniverse, Inc.

Chapter One

As Dickens would have said, it was the coldest of times. It was the warmest of times. It was a season of war. It was a season of peace. It was the Year of the Monkey. I stumbled through the tear gas on Wisconsin's campus, past the armed forces of the national guard, eyes brimming in tears, and I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going in 1968.

I was trying to be a poet in those days. The shocks of assassinations, the outrages in Vietnam, and rising racial violence filled us with distaste and disillusionment. My friends and I took the graduate courses, struggled to become immersed in writing poetry and to cope with the horrific events swirling around us, and watched our country betray its ideals. It is difficult, in retrospect, to convey the depths of my despair that year. The first seven months of 1968 saw several events of which even the retelling shades the many joyous remembrances of that time in darkness.

January was a brutally cold month in Madison. In Vietnam, it was hot and sultry. On January 10, the one thousandth US warplane was lost in Vietnam.

Eleven days later, on January 21, a group of thirty-one North Korean commandos trudged undetected through the snow for about forty miles from the border to the presidential Blue House of South Korean President Park Chung-hee in downtown Seoul. Twenty-eight North Koreans and thirty-four South Koreans were killed in the fighting. The same week, on January 23, North Korean patrol boats captured the USS Pueblo, a US intelligence gathering ship, and its eighty-three man crew, charging that Pueblo and its crew had violated North Korea's twelve-mile territorial limit.

Several thousand miles to the south of the Korean peninsula, on the eve of the lunar new year, the North Vietnamese initiated what became known as the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, launching major coordinated attacks for the first time on South Vietnam's supposedly well-secured urban centers. As the Year of the Monkey began, these attacks belied the assurances of the White House of President Lyndon Johnson that victory was imminent for the American and South Vietnamese forces.

We read in amazement that the American Embassy in Saigon had been seized and held by the Vietcong (a political and military organization that fought the South Vietnamese and American forces) for six hours on the same morning. Although we did not realize it at the time, these events finally would mark a turning point in American public opinion regarding the war, but to my friends and me, the new Year of the Monkey held little promise of any change in the drumbeat of tragic news from Asia.

In February, we saw on the front pages of the Capital Times of Madison the sickening, Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a South Vietnamese official summarily shooting a Vietcong prisoner in the head with his revolver. The Valentine's Day week saw the highest American weekly casualty toll of the Vietnam War: 543 killed and 2547 wounded. Shortly afterward, an American Army major informed the world that it had been necessary to destroy an entire Vietnamese village in order to save it. An Orwellian world had become manifest sixteen years earlier than George Orwell predicted.

As New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy (former attorney general and brother of President John F. Kennedy) decided to join the presidential race in mid-March, rumors from Vietnam—substantiated years later—hinted of unarmed Vietnamese villagers being massacred by American soldiers. In My Lai—a farming village—more than half of the village's five hundred non-combatant inhabitants were reportedly killed by US Army Lieutenant Calley and the men of Company C. Accounts of such atrocities became regular reading fare in the Capital Times. My friends and I viewed the American government's initial denials of such events with the same skepticism and outright disbelief as the previous three years' weekly optimistic reports of the progress of the war.

Amid our despair, there were Americans we considered heroes. Robert Kennedy promised to end the war, if elected president. Another brave man, African-American Baptist minister and civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., was eloquently decrying the immoral war while he battled for black equality. Dr. King led a march in Memphis in the name of peace and racial equality on March 28. Like so many such events, it turned violent, as police intervened. After King himself had been led from the scene, one sixteen-year-old black boy was killed, sixty people were injured, and more than one hundred fifty people were arrested.

That week, on the way to classes one rainy morning, we walked past hundreds of small crosses in cemetery rows on the sloping lawn of Bascom Hall. The March 29, 1968 issue of Time noted the four hundred thirty-five crosses and the cortege of mock mourners who shuffled past, chanting, "Pray for the dead and the dead will pray for you; pray for the dead." We saw the sign posted near the crosses. "BASCOM MEMORIAL CEMETERY, CLASS OF 1968."

For senior students and graduate students, the sign and funeral procession were shocking reminders that death in Vietnam was a possibility, if a student deferment ended. To my surprise, the crosses and the sign were still on the lawn in the evening, untouched by university officials, who seemed to sympathize with the protesting students and to approve of the dignified and nonviolent antiwar demonstration.

Several days later, seven friends and I gathered at the apartment of another graduate student on the evening of March 31 to listen to a speech by President Lyndon Johnson. In his "Address to the Nation Announcing Steps to Limit the War in Vietnam and Reporting His Decision Not to Seek Reelection," President Johnson announced the first in a series of limitations on bombing by American forces, promising to halt these activities above the twentieth parallel. I rejoiced in the president's pledge as the first official indication of American intent to wind down the war and to negotiate an honorable end, as newscaster Walter Cronkite had advocated in his historic report in February.

Then came the president's words that brought my friends and me to our feet, dancing and shouting. Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection in November. The Vietnam War had claimed its most prominent American political casualty, and we were ecstatic. We hugged each other exultantly. (In later years I have come to appreciate tremendously the many great accomplishments of President Johnson, but in 1968 the Vietnam War was our foremost measure of the man.)

Our joy was short-lived. Four days later, on April 4,Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, where he had been planning his Poor People's March on Washington to take place late in the month. Robert Kennedy, hearing of the murder just before he was to give a speech in Indianapolis, delivered a powerful, extemporaneous eulogy in which he pled with the audience "to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."

The King assassination sparked rioting in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Newark, Washington DC, and many other cities. Across the country, forty-six deaths resulted from the riots. Our despair increased daily.

My circle of friends at graduate school was a valuable support group during this dark period. Four couples had come together by chance. We picnicked, sailed, drank, studied, and smoked marijuana together (although I was an infrequent smoker, because the pungent smoke hurt my eyes, if I was wearing contact lenses, which was almost all the time). Two of the circle I had known before Wisconsin. Hans Krichels had been one class ahead of me at Dartmouth College and my student advisor when I was a freshman.

Besides Hans, our group of close friends consisted of his girlfriend, Debbie; my roommate, Bob Jacobs (who was a longtime friend from elementary school and high-school days in Buffalo); Bob's girlfriend, Michelle; Ingvi Jonsson (a young Icelandic student studying journalism at Wisconsin, who lived across the hall from Bob and me); Ingvi's wife, Hrefna (who was a flight attendant for Icelandic Airlines); my girlfriend, Dariel Lynn Rousar (who was an undergraduate student in Scandinavian Studies at Wisconsin); and me. Hans, Bob, Michelle, and I were in the English department. All of us were strongly against the war and in support of civil rights. It is a gross understatement to say that we were all also extremely depressed and cynical during this difficult period.

Dariel and I clung to each other and to our friends during those bitter months. Fortunately, Madison and the campus of the University of Wisconsin are beautiful in any season, nestled among four frozen lakes in winter and caressed by warmer winds off the lakes in spring, summer, and autumn. Despite the grim reminders of reality—in the form of the national guardsmen standing guard on the campus and the occasional student protest with its incense of tear gas—we endured, celebrating nature, partying with our friends, writing poetry, and loving each other. Tough times on the world and national scenes somehow generated inner spiritual warmth that in the Year of the Monkey kept us going.

I recall one trip across the frozen wasteland of Lake Mendota in January, with the wind whistling across the ice and our faces white with cold. When the darkness fell on us late in the afternoon, as we skated back across the ice, the lights of the student union on the shore glowed warmly as our beacons.

In the gray light of another Wisconsin winter afternoon, we walked through the university arboretum in February, after a massive snowstorm, rejoicing in the grandeur of the snow-covered trees and bushes, and laughing at the plumes of snow that dropped on our heads from overhanging boughs. The arboretum was a favorite place—unearthly quiet, exquisite in its barren, leafless silhouettes on all sides, and intriguing in its snow-cast trails of the deer, foxes, and other animals there. Dariel and I shared a love of the outdoors in all seasons.

I first saw Dariel at a holiday party of the student Scandinavian Club—a New Year's Eve party, as 1967 ended. My Icelandic neighbor across the hall in the apartment house, where Bob Jacobs and I shared a two bedroom, comfortable apartment, had become a good friend, often sleeping on our couch, when his wife kicked him out of their apartment after arguments. Ingvi knew of my love for Sweden and Swedish culture, engendered by my summer work in Uppsala, Sweden, and Lapland during the summers of 1964, 1965, and 1967, so he persuaded me to join the Scandinavian Club on campus. There were lots of Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians in the club, of course, as well as a few students from Iceland and Finland, and I became friends with several of them.

Ingvi, Hrefna, and I went to the club's party, which featured a hilarious skit performed by about a dozen student club members. I don't remember much about the skit, except that it was a bit ribald, reminded me of Chaucerian stories, and starred a lovely, saucy, dark-haired girl as the flirtatious French maid in a skimpy costume. I was very interested. In fact, I was struck by the "thunderbolt," as my Sicilian neighbors on Buffalo's west side would have put it. The student's throaty laugh and earthiness, and captivating brown eyes, particularly attracted me. As I was trying to figure how to get introduced to the French maid after the skit was over, the cast members retired after the club's party to her house, where she lived with her mother, to continue the party. I tagged along as a mixture of rain and snow began to fall.

I am usually not a very devious person. That morning, however, as the party wound down at the French maid's house, I decided to slip my umbrella into a corner of the living room at Dariel's home and to conveniently leave it there when I left the party. Several days later, when I returned to retrieve it, Dariel and I sat down and talked over hot cocoa. I discovered that she had studied in Copenhagen, was the youngest of three children (like me), was athletic, had summered during her childhood at a cabin on a lake, and had been a member of the Peace Corps Club in her school days in Madison. We were similar in many ways. That was the beginning of a wonderful relationship, which, like all of the best things in life, seeded incredible joy and some pain at its end.

As Madison and the university blossomed in April with thousands of daffodils and tulips, Dariel moved in with me. She was working as a dental assistant (her father had been a dentist before his death and had trained her well) and was in her junior year at Wisconsin. Besides being warm, sensitive, and beautiful, I soon discovered Dariel was very smart, cared deeply for her widowed mother, Grace, loved adventure in life and the outdoors, and appreciated weird, pop culture, such as that spring's surprise hit, "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" by Tiny Tim.

My friends and I were working as research assistants at the university, helping the famous linguist, Frederic Cassidy, compile the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). We worked as so-called "pre-editors," compiling information furnished by field workers across the country about American word usage—from conversations with older people, publications, and surveys. Some of the words were hilarious! For example, Americans have many names for the kind of sandwich that includes meats, cheeses, lettuce, tomatoes, and other condiments served in a long bun. What DARE was trying to accomplish was to inform (and often illustrate through the use of maps based on fieldwork) where the words "hero," "hoagie," "grinder," "sub," "torpedo," and "Cuban" are the local terms for this sandwich. When some word or phrase usages were quite rare, a map depicting the location of their use revealed how a particular word or phrase had migrated across the country, as members of a village or family had dispersed. Needless to say, many of the terms we dealt with were not as innocuous as kinds of food. We were in stitches much of the time, particularly with the usage of sexual terms.

Professor Cassidy had a fine sense of humor and joined us in laughter while trying to maintain a semblance of order and decorum in the pre-editors' room. A distinguished looking older man, he delighted in listening to a person speak for a few minutes, and then, like Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, telling the person, based on word pronunciation and usage, where they had been born, grown up, and gone to school. He was a fantastic boss. I am still thankful for the laughter and positive, intellectual nourishment my editing work and Fred Cassidy provided me that difficult year.

In April, Dariel and I visited my family's Buffalo home, Niagara Falls, Dartmouth College, and New Hampshire's White Mountains in the incredible beauty of a northern spring, borrowing my parents' old Dodge. We camped at the Dartmouth Outing Club cabin on the summit of Mt. Moosilauke in New Hampshire, still surrounded by snow, danced through the Canadian gardens at Niagara Falls, and walked the beaches and woods of Holloway Bay on Lake Erie in Canada. We saw the only flock of rose-breasted grosbeaks that I have ever seen, near my family's cabin on the northern shore of the lake. The world and my heart were warming. I told my parents that I might marry this amazing woman.

June in the university arboretum was a perfume heaven in the lilac garden. Dariel and I spent rapturous afternoons in the lilacs, picnicking among the fragrant blossoms of every color imaginable. With her in my arms in the sunshine and my senses overwhelmed by the warmth, smells, and beauty of her and the Earth all around us, those moments for me hid for a time the world that otherwise buffeted us emotionally and intellectually. On June 5, we returned to the apartment to learn that Bobby Kennedy had been shot in a hotel earlier that morning. He died the next day.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Time of the Monkey, Rooster, and Dog by Charles A. Hobbie Copyright © 2011 by Charles A. Hobbie. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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