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MEMORIAL DAY: Add Your Prayers & Awareness
My late father, Leonard Farber, volunteered to join the US Army Air Corps before World War II broke out and became one of the first high-altitude flight technicians. He was a very likable and handsome New Yorker sent down to Georgia for basic training, which was the way they used to do it in the military - they still may do it that way. Ship all the Northerners south and the Southerners north, take everyone away from their families and make the military their family.
My father was in no way religious, but he identified himself as a Jew and this sounded a bell for the Southerners, a fight bell. My father told me that he soon found himself being picked on by one of the biggest guys he had ever seen, let alone fought, but his days on the mean streets of NYC and as co-captain of the Seward Park High School football team had taught him how to deal with bullies - you have to stand up to them and bully them back.
And so a fight was organized, ring and all, and they went at it until a draw was declared and from that day on if you said a bad thing about my father you had to fight that big Southerner who became his best friend on base. And my father had a lot of friends. As a high-altitude flight technician he was one of the first people to work with and understand the properties of oxygen, which was used to keep the pilots conscious at high altitudes. My father had a lot of the inventor in him and through rigorous and personal experiment he discovered that oxygen cured hangovers! Thats why he had so many friends!!!
Every Sunday morning he had a line of bleary eyed soldiers waiting to get a whiff or three of oxygen to clear their hangovers from a night in town. My father ran one of the first oxygen bars in the world! He also invented a new kind of fuel tank for bombers that almost got put into production and should be put into production now.
Along with oxygen, he learned a lot about carbon dioxide (CO2), what we all breathe out, and he realized that it could be used as a fire retarding agent on fuel tanks of fighters and bombers. He designed and built a fuel tank that had a second fuel tank wrapped around it containing carbon dioxide. When a hot bullet was shot into the fuel tank, it first penetrated the outer CO2 filled tank and pulled the CO2 into the fuel-filled tank with it, thereby putting out the fire before it got going. It was tried by the Air Corps and it worked, but then the war ended and it was forgotten. Think of all of the war plane and helicopter pilots in Korea, Viet Nam, and around the world whose lives could have been spared had the government insisted that those Farber Fuel Tanks been installed on every war plane and helicopter.
I never thought about it until now, but I wish that my father would have pursued selling his idea to Lockheed or Boeing or Bell or Grumman or some manufacturer of military aircraft. I'm not sure why he didn't - it could have been that the Army felt that they owned the idea - but I know for a fact that my father was not able to deal well with the rejection that is a natural part of selling or implementing anything new in this world.
I know this to be true because when he was mustered out of the Air Force after the war, he started what was probably the first oxygen business in the country, certainly in the New York metropolitan area, but it failed. I think it failed because it was ahead of its time. I don't know the circumstances, but I do know that is why my father never wanted me to be a musician or to try anything where the danger of being hurt by rejection was a possibility. He wanted me to be an accountant and though I wish I knew accounting, I'm glad that I am who I am.
Amy and I don't let rejection and failure stop us from doing anything that we believe in. We don't take "no" for an answer. We keep going no matter what. Our motto is that we're either going to make it or die trying. If my father had had a bit more of our entrepreneurial spirit in him, he would have become a rich man, something he really wanted more than anything. It was not meant to be because he chose to let disappointment stop him.
Did he have an excuse for that kind of thinking? Yes, but he never told me until I was in my thirties. My grandfather, his father, had been the kind of fall down in the gutter asleep drunk that most people think don't really exist. Well, they used to and they probably still do, but now they fall asleep at home or - damn them to hell - behind the wheel of cars.
So my father allowed his life as a businessman to be negatively affected by my grandfather the drunk and drug addict(!) - my grandfather died with a Demerol needle in his arm! My grandfather's pain was that he, too, was very bright - he could fix anything from a clock to a ship's boiler, but he had no schooling and couldn't find work other than being a building superintendent. He had also been wounded in I believe the Spanish American War and had been given morphine to ease the pain. It created more pain than it eased when he became dependent on it.
My father's self image was ruined by this kind of shameful behavior by his father even though it was my grandfather who had something to be ashamed of, not my father. If you have a parent who is doing things they should be ashamed of, make sure that you keep in your awareness the fact that this is them and you are you. What some jerk does doesn't mean that you are a jerk or that you have to let it affect you, even if they're your parent.
So after the oxygen business failed, my mother and he met and married for some reason unknown to both of them a few years after they tied the knot, but by that time me and my sister and my mother were all there with our mouths open needing to be fed from my father's meager pay check. My father had fled the entrepreneurial life for the safety and security of a career with terrible hours but steady pay, medical benefits and pension - he became an NYPD cop and retired a sergeant. He was good at it, but he could have been good at business and being rich, too, had he been able to overcome his sorrow and fears. He never tried to do anything entrepreneurial again except sell World Book Encyclopedias when money got tighter than tight.
So this Memorial Day I've written a memorial piece for my father, a soldier who did his part in keeping all of us free to have computers and blogs and Starbucks coffee and organic food. If you like living in America and speaking English instead of Japanese or German, thank a member of that great generation who answered their country's call. I didn't - answer my country's call, but I have always thanked military and police officers and fire-persons and reservists - you know whom I'm talking about, the men and women who make our impossibly luxurious lives possible. Without them, the bad, thieving, sick, immoral, vicious, violent, murderous, hateful people - for whatever motivation - would rob and hurt and kill everyone that they could. Don't ever forget that and live in a dream world, like my father used to tell me that I lived in one. And he was right, in a way. But I surely live in a dream world today, one where I speak to his spirit more often than I spoke to him when he was alive.
When Viet Nam came I did not believe that we had any business fighting and dying there and I said so. The draft had come down to a lottery by 1968 and my birthday, January 22, came up number 336, I believe. It would have taken the Red Chinese landing on the beaches of Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York, before they'd be drafting me!
My father thought I was a coward and a fool and said so, loud and often. He was in charge of a squad of club swinging cops during many of the anti-war protest riots and we fought almost as bitterly about the issue at home. He didn't want to see his only son die in Viet Nam but he believed that young men should do their duty.
Years later, when the truth of that horrible war became known, my father apologized to me for his being wrong about my stance on the Viet Nam war. It was the only thing he ever apologized to me about - not throwing me out of the house for good when I was a teenager for no good reason other than so he could be alone with his girlfriends, not for looking at me like an accident waiting to happen and giving me no affection because he was afraid that I would grow up mentally ill like my mother had become, not for ridiculing my choice of wanting to be a songwriter musician poet and never ever coming to here me play, nope. Just Viet Nam and I'm glad he did.
That was him and I am me and I don't blame him for anything. He did the best he could with what he had, just like I'm trying to do. And he never drank around me - I never knew that alcoholism was the great murderous problem it is because my father stopped the cycle and for that I am proud of him. Plus, he provided for the children he had as best he was able and lots of men do not even try to do that. They leave. My father didn't leave my mother, she left him.
Amy and I made a conscious choice not to have children because we knew that we weren't cut out to be parents for a number of reasons (I can write more about that some other time). My father and mother shouldn't have had children, though I'm of course glad that they did. They separated and divorced when I was 12 and my sister Karen was 10. Though it was devastating at the time, I know that they did the right thing.
We moved in with my aunt Rosie who basically sacrificed her life to help my mother and Karen and me. My mother was not the most grateful person, to say the least. Later, my uncle, their brother Morris, came back from living and working in Europe and we all lived together for a while. Rosie was a second mother to me and Morris taught me more than any father could. They were educated and different and traveled and cool and they helped me feel good about myself when I really had very little reason to. I love them so and as I watch them and my mother totter through their 80's, it can become overwhelming for this Aquarius and his detached emotions.
But I am so very fortunate to have lived and loved with Amy all of these years and I've not only endured, I've triumphed, as best a human can in the face of age and sickness and loss and death. No hubris here, just realism of the Kali and Shiva side of life as well as the Enchanted World side. Plus, Amy and I had Amy's mother, Jessie Spicer Zerner as both a surrogate mother and a best friend. Losing her was almost too much to bear.
She's whom I am in contact with when I do psychic readings (more on that some other time). Jessie had been an Air Raid Warden during WWII, making sure that all the lights in her neighborhood were blacked out during air raid drills so that the German bombers couldn't have accurate targets to hit if they came.
So on this Memorial Day I acknowledge my debt to my father and Jessie and Amy's dad Ray, who was in the Army, and my uncle who also was in the Army and was the only one of the group to serve overseas, and to a lessor extent my mother and aunt. This generation lived with the reality that we all forget - that Hitler almost won! The Japanese almost won! Now we worry about our computers crashing. They worried about dying in battle or invasion.
Lately, too late in my opinion, people of this generation have started to be called The Greatest Generation. They endured WWII AND the Depression! They were great. They were tough or they were toughened or they succumbed and became mentally ill, but they were there and I salute every one of your relatives who were there, too, during the dark hours of the many wars the United States of America has fought so that we can lead the amazing lives we all lead, lives that would have been thought to be the most outrageous fantasy only fifty years ago.
And if you are in the military now or recently or know someone who is, please know/tell them that there are a lot of people who greatly appreciate their service and their sacrifice and are trying to do what we can to make sure that they get treated well now and compensated adequately later for what they're doing for all of us. The war against terrorism is a war that I would have volunteered for had I been of age when it broke out. My father would have been proud of me, maybe, but that's not why I would have volunteered. If anyone's interested, write me and I'll explain more. If I don't hear from anyone, I'll just move on to another topic.
Memorial Day is not just a day to take off and eat hot dogs. It is a day to make sure that you add to your prayers and your meditation and your awareness the many, many people of the past whose sacrifice has contributed to giving us the life we have now and that includes everyone, not just military people. Being grateful for one's life and aware of one's mortality and forgiving of everyone but on guard to protect those you care about from harm is the daily state of every thinking person on Earth. May we one day know the peace envisioned by everyone who has fought and died to insure its coming.
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