Fragments of a Life

Shortly after my parents died thirteen years ago, I was cleaning out the basement of my childhood home in preparation of selling the house. While sweeping out the storage closet, I stumbled upon a strange, black cardboard box that had been stashed behind a wardrobe trunk, unseen for nearly 30 years. It was an uncanny moment for me since I thought I knew every square inch of that old house (I was forever redecorating its drab interiors when I returned home briefly after college) and yet had never seen this dusty, slightly dilapidated carton before.

Lifting it with the urgency of Pandora flipping open her fabled box, I popped the lid and uncovered a cache of yellowed newspaper clippings, well-preserved scrapbooks and hastily scrawled letters from France that I soon realized, by reading the dates, had been written during the First World War. This unexpected “buried treasure” amazed and delighted me, but there was still more. Beneath the paper ephemera I uncovered dozens of magnificent sepia-tone photographs, kept in immaculate condition, not having seen the light of day in three decades. I’d been a collector of antique photographs since college, when I raided the local antique stores at my college, looking for faded pictures of yesterday’s students (all male).

But here was a king’s ransom worth of one-of-a-kind images: pristine snapshots of a devilish boy winking at the camera; of the same young man, as a teenager, at the Kentucky Military Institute in 1911, huddling into a human pyramid with his schoolmates, spiffy in their thick, striped, woolen suits; pictures of this strangely enigmatic fellow (he always wore a scowl) and his rowdy pals cavorting amidst a surprisingly brand-new Palm Beach in the 1910s. He must have been what we used to call a “four letter man” for there were scores of stilted portraits of him in ill-fitting uniforms on the track, baseball, basketball and football teams, including one of him with his arm in a sling, sporting a mock expression of pained outrage. There’s a framed portrait of this intriguing stranger in the school marching band and another of him made-up as a toothless hillbilly in some outrageous amateur skit.

I say “stranger” with some irony, because the more I delved into this material, the more it became clear that this person I was staring at, and quickly becoming fascinated by, was a relative of mine. (more…)

Guatemala Adventure

I had packed several travel journals written by jaded English aristocrats, contemporary guides from Fodor and Cadogan, and Gore Vidal’s 1949 novel, Dark Green, Bright Red—written during his long sojourn in Central America, but nothing prepared me for the strange beauty of Guatemala. The night my friends and I arrived in Guatemala City, we rented a car and drove 30 miles in the diesel-scented darkness to Antigua, the country’s former capital. A hurricane had just swept through, leaving nothing but misery in its wake, or so we had been told in countless TV news reports. But I soon discovered that, while the devastation was indeed extensive, few of the most popular tourist destinations had been adversely affected and the country was yearning for visitors. It proved an opportune time to explore this majestic country, one of the western hemisphere’s best kept secrets.

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Vienna On The Verge

I first fell in love with Vienna as a kid listening to records with my father at our house in Long Island. Dad put on an old 78 of tenor Richard Tauber, the great star of 1930s operetta. Tauber’s black and white photo on the cover exuded a bygone era of mitteleuropean glamour: top hat, white tails and a gleaming monocle, pinched over one eye like a diamond-appraiser’s loupe. I was drawn to the image’s nostalgia, just as I laughed, even as a child, at its camp gestalt. Once Tauber began to sing, I was swept away by the melodies, most of them composed by Johann Strauss, “the Waltz King.” The music, in three-quarter time, called to me in a profound way, as if I’d heard it before and been waiting for it ever since. Vienna was indeed, as Tauber crooned, “The City of My Dreams.”

But by the time I was old enough to actually get there, friends had persuaded me that Vienna was a ghost town, a boring Eastern European backwater. After the Iron Curtain was created, Vienna’s significance as a crossroads diminished and the heyday of the Austro-Hungarian empire became a faint memory. “It’s nothing but old people, an expensive rest home for cranky Austrians,” a well-heeled traveler warned. But when the Iron Curtain came down, Vienna, like much of Eastern Europe, was shaken up by a frenzy of modernization and an influx of young people. It is a completely different city today, on the verge of being a vital and influential world capital again.

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