History | The Gad About Town

9/11/01 From 1021 Miles Away

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
—T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets

* * * *
Whichever online resumé/job search websites that existed in the late 1990s were in their infancy, so the professional job search that I pursued from 1997 till 2000 was so old-fashioned in its technology that whenever I describe life in that time period to friends in their twenties or thirties I think they picture me in a suit and fedora with a cheroot in my teeth and a lamp with a green shade angled over my work.

I bought the New York Times each morning and discarded everything but the Employment pages. (“Employment” sounded so much more professional, and hopefully permanent, than the “Help Wanted” label in the local paper.) There would be three to six new ads for editorial positions each day. I’d swivel around in the office chair from the table on which I laid out the ads to which I would respond to the computer on which I’d rewrite my cover letter to match my resumé to the ad’s requirements. All of the jobs were in New York City. I was 28, an award-winning newspaper columnist with years of editorial experience, and hungry.
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‘Mystic chords of memory …’

Posted on November 11, 2024 by Mark Aldrich

On this particular Veterans Day, in this particular time and place and moment, I think more of my Civil War ancestors, and what it meant to be a part of the Union. I do not know what it meant for them; I know what they mean to me.

* * * *
I do not know what my great-great-grandfather James Metcalf (above) saw at the Battle of Gettysburg. He and his father, Amos, my great-great-great-grandfather, were both there with the 6th Battery, 1st Battalion, Maine Light Artillery.

The list of locations (from the National Park Service) at which the 6th Battery saw action while my Metcalf ancestors served from November 15, 1861, till the war’s end includes the names of some of the bloodiest battles in Civil War history: Antietam, the Wilderness Campaign, the months-long Siege of Petersburg, and Gettysburg. James was a private and his father was a hospital cook, so perhaps their experiences were different ones. However, both died years after the war of diseases contracted in service: Amos was disabled with rheumatism and died in 1883, and James died of malaria in 1905. Amos was in his forties during the war, and James turned twenty in 1863.
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60 Years

Posted on November 22, 2023 by Mark Aldrich

The two saddest photographs in my memory both commemorate a tragic historical event that might not have happened, an alternate reality: a daylight photo of an iceberg with a streak of dark paint along its waterline that was seen from the deck of one of the ocean liners that rescued survivors the day after the Titanic sank. The other is a photo of the presidential limo in which President Kennedy lost his life earlier that day, but with its bulletproof top installed. It was about to be loaded on the plane back to Washington, DC.

It was a sunny day in Dallas sixty years ago today, so the top was deemed unnecessary for a brief parade across the city. I saw a presidential motorcade once myself, in 2004. It was a sunny day in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that day, too, but there were no convertibles to be seen. The specific route was not published; the city block I lived on included the arena at which President Bush was to hold a campaign event, so streets near my apartment building were blocked with large equipment.