Sic Semper Tyrannis

Richard Sale - In Memoriam

Richard Sale

Richard died last night of pancreatic cancer.  He had suffered with that for three years.  He was a dear personal friend and until his last illness wrote often for SST.  pl 

I stopped watching ...

 

"In Kitchen Confidential he wrote candidly about falling into a depression that was fanned by his substance abuse. “I could no longer bear even to pick up the phone; I’d just listen to the answering machine, afraid or unwilling to pick up, the plaintive entreaties of the caller an annoyance,” he wrote. “I was in hiding, in a deep, dark hole, and it was dawning on me — as I cracked my oysters, and opened clams, and spooned cocktail sauce into ramekins — that it was time, really time, to try to climb out.”

It was in the 80s that Bourdain said he looked in the mirror and decided he “wanted to live.”

“It wasn't that I had any discipline or strength necessarily,” he told trade publication Nation’s Restaurant News in a 2000 interview. “It was just that I'd decided that, among my friends and the people I'd come up with, I would survive and go on and live, and in order to do that, in order to do anything, there was absolutely no question that I would have to leave [drugs] behind me.”"  Buzzfeed

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 We stopped watching Bourdain about a year ago.  He was always entertaining and informative but the pain and desolation in his heart became so evident that I, for one, could not bear it any longer. 

His account of his teen years as a kitchen assistant in a seaside resort was particularly hard to watch.  I worked in such places during high school summers in coastal Maine as; bus boy, dish washer, baker's assistant, soda fountain ice cream guy, fry cook, short order cook and breakfast cook.  The drugs, sex and rock and roll that he described in one program saturated the atmosphere with their seasonal people blend of; professional restaurant workers, local kids, tourists and college girls on the loose for the summer.  That atmosphere ate him alive and I do not think he ever recovered from it.  A profound sense of ennui settled over him that he never shook off.  He may well have had a genetic disposition toward clinical depression but the cocaine, heroin and massive amounts of alcohol did not make it any better.

We still have recordings of some of his best shows.  One was in Lyons and two were in Quebec where he was entertained by two zany Qubecois restaurateurs.  Their feast, cooked up in  a  nice little building sitting on a frozen lake, was memorable.  There were a lot of courses but I particularly liked the "bit" in which they grilled foie gras on the flat top of a wood burning stove.

For me, his saddest show was focused on a trip to what had once been a laird's hunting lodge in the Scottish Highlands.  It is now a place of amusement for fat-assed City of London bankers and the like.  There he was walked up into the hills, loaned an expensive rifle and pointed at a majestic stag.  He dutifully shot the beast and was escorted down to the corpse where his keepers painted his face with the animal's arterial blood in a ceremony that once had an animistic meaning but now has none.  I shot a lot of deer in my youth but was always just a pot hunter going to the woods to stay with my friends and uncles.  I have always been strongly affected by the logo from the film "The Deerhunter," in which the wings on the Army parachute badge are replaced with the antlers of a stag.   Bourdain's face smeared with the elk's blood brought that to mind.  pl 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Bourdain

https://www.buzzfeed.com/krystieyandoli/anthony-bourdain-depression-addiction-mental-illness-chef?utm_term=.ybjLqEAVN#.fwvzXpWKP

"Mick" Trainor - dead at 89

I was lucky enough to have some wonderful friends in the military; enlisted men too numerous to list, Colonel Robert Sawyer, Colonel David Hackworth and Lt. General  Bernard Trainor, USMC come to mind immediately. 

Mick was a product of Jesuit education at Holy Cross.  He was an absolutely no BS marine.  No swagger sticks, no Sam Browne belt, none of that kind of swagger appealed to him.  He was a grunt's grunt.  This is high praise from me.   In character he was "a good and faithful tiger."  He was very sharp in the mind and vigorous in the body until late in his term of life.  He was wryly, humorously resigned to man's fate. I remember sitting across the table from him on St. Patrick's Day watching him eat corned beef and cabbage.  To accompany that he buttered up crackers and then salted them.  He said to me that he often visited his mother in the old people's home she lived in.  "Pat, you should see the people there with her.  Husks of humans, mere husks, you don't want to live that long."  And then he reached for another cracker.

He was Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations in USMC headquarters when the catastrophic Beirut barracks bombing occurred.  It was understood that but for that he would have been the next Commandant of the United States Marine Corps.

In retirement he was the military correspondent of the New York Times and wrote (with Michael Gordon) several excellent books.

He was a wonderful friend.  pl

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/obituaries/bernard-e-trainor-dead.html

Razan al-Najjar (F B Ali)

Razan al-Najjar died on Friday, June 1^st.

She was a 21-year old Palestinian nurse and paramedic. And a mother.

She was killed while running (along with other paramedics) towards the Gaza border fence with Israel.

They were running to treat some Palestinian protesters who had been wounded by shots fired from across the border.

Like the others with her, she was wearing her white paramedic uniform and waving her arms above her head as she ran towards the fence.

An Israeli sniper on the other side of the fence aimed at her, and put a bullet in her chest.

Razan al-Najjar is dead. Like the 120 or so others killed at the fence in the last couple of months.

Razan al-Najjar is dead. The Israeli military says it will investigate.   

Razan al-Najjar is dead. Is there anything further to say?

Oh! yes, one thing: I prefer this picture of hers to the other one.

 

Soldiers. She is ours and we are hers.

"Charles would have been retired by now and probably coaching Jordan on a flag football team. He would have been the one to take care of the back-to-school medical forms that I turned in almost a month late. I know he would have remembered Mother’s Day.

We will always feel the void that Charles left, but after so many years without him we are finally happy. We spend summer weekends on the Jersey Shore. We host about 25 relatives and friends at our annual Christmas dinner. I no longer feel guilty when I go out for an evening of grown-up conversation and companionship.

But there are still moments when I am nearly overcome with fear about how I will manage to keep our family thriving. The anxiety seems to grip me most on stormy nights, when the wind is howling and thunder cracks in the distance.

As I watch over my son sleeping sound and snug on those nights, I know that he is bathed, his belly is full and he is safe. And yet, it is when the storms seem to be bearing down on us that I have my doubts about how I will continue to manage the responsibilities of two parents.

I was having just such a moment a few weeks ago when Jordan and I were saying our bedtime prayers. I asked God to please help me to successfully raise this child.

Sensing my anxiety, Jordan hugged me after we prayed. “Don’t worry, Mom,” he said. “I’ll help you raise me.”"

Dana Canedy is a senior editor at The New York Times and the author of the memoir “A Journal for Jordan.”

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/we-lost-our-soldier-but-we-are-still-an-intact-family/?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0

Sacred to the memory of...

An Indian friend sent this phtograph from a church in North India.  It reminds me that there are veterans graves everywhere.  It reminds of the monument I crossed a strret to look at in the dusty little Vietnamese town of Lai Khe in 1968.  The town was at the center of the 1st US Infantry Division's headquarters camp.  The monument was "Sacred to the memory of the officers and men of the 6th Moroccan Spahis 1947-1954."  pl

We have lost a friend- Leila Abu-Saba

I regret to inform the SST community that Leila Abu-Saba has left us all after reaching the end of her long struggle with cancer.

Requiescat in pace.  pl

http://mondoweiss.net/2009/10/goodbye-to-leila-abu-saba.html