Uncle Alam

Oldie... but hopefully goodie. I wrote this as a "narrative essay" for a sophomore English class in college. I never saw it as much more than a paper dashed off in fulfillment of a class I had to take, but I had this great instructor, Sister Mary Dominic, who insisted I polish it up a little and try submitting it for review. The essay, pretty gratifyingly, ended up taking second place in a national competition among Catholic colleges. A pretty fond memory, and, if I recall, the first time I was ever paid for something I wrote.

Uncle Alam

     I remember the first time I saw him. It was early in the morning, and I was wondering why Dad had woken me up and prodded me into the kitchen. The first thing my bleary eyes settled on was a thin man with a dark curly beard.

     “This is Alam Sher”, Dad was saying, “and he’s going to be our helper.. But we’re not going to treat him like some slave.”

     Alam smiled at me, bashfully. He seemed more shy of me than I of him. “OK”, I said. I shook his hand, andsat down at the table while he prepared the first of thousands of breakfasts for us.

     Alam was an Afghan Pushtun from the Mohmand tribe. He left his village of Hazarnow near the city of Jalalabad and moved to Kacha Garhi refugee camp outside of Peshawar, Pakistan, where he was recommended to my parents, who were looking for a helper. He seemed to be in his early forties when he first started working for us - like many Afghans, he was himself unsure of his exact age. He was, as I’ve said, a thin, almost puny man. He wore, like a lot of Afghan men, a black herbal concoction on his eyes like eyeliner. This was supposed to ward off the evil eye, but to look at his bony frame you knew he needed more help than that. His beard was kept neatly trimmed and combed, and he kept a well-chewed stick to clean his teeth with. He was fastidious about his appearance, almost to the point of fussiness.

 

     Maybe this fact, coupled with the fact that, unlike most chowkidars, or doormen, around Peshawar, Alam’s job entailed, in addition to answering the gate, bicycling around town doing various errands for my mother, cooking, and cleaning, gave an answer as to why Alam was treated the way he was by the other men around town. They didn’t despise him, by any means, but they looked at him as they would an old grandma. I always wondered, in this male-dominated society, if he wasn’t ashamed of his job. He made it very clear he wasn’t. Alam never lost a chance to show how proud he was of his job, and how much he respected my parents, his employers.

     And this pride powered his work ethic, which was amazing. He came at 6 o’clock in the morning and began getting breakfast ready. After breakfast, he washed the dishes, cleaned the kitchen, and then, one by one, every room in the house. He also did a little mali (gardener) work, as well as fed our dogs, washed our clothes, fed us lunch and dinner and of course, answer the gate. He did all this with an almost careless efficiency. These jobs, like every job, entailed a thousand little details: Uncle Alam, as we came to call him, quickly learned which clothes Mom wanted washed separately from the others, where she wanted certain things kept, how to feed the dogs at the same time so as to keep them from fighting over the food, whom to let in at the gate, when NOT to answer the gate, even how each of us kids liked our eggs done.

     And through it all, he found the time to be a dear friend. “Uncle” was to us more than a term of polite respect - it spoke of the gentle familiarity we had with Alam. I remember well the impish long face he wore when he’d tell one of his terrible, fabricated tragedies- one of our dogs had been run over, or my mom’s favorite cactus was dying. Then he would break into a toothy grin and give his characteristic “huh-huh-huh”, a hoarse throaty chuckle that brought an affectionate but exasperated grin to my mother’s face.

     Alam was literally like a member of the family. My parents felt comfortable leaving us children alone with him, sometimes overnight, trusting him even with disciplining us and refereeing our petty squabbles. We in turn, loved him as if he were a combination of uncle, mother, and big brother. He was so close to us that I often forgot he had a family of his own.

     But he did, and his gentle nature extended to them. In contrast to the much stereotyped, but all too often accurate image of the chauvinistic, overbearing Muslim husband, Alam loved his wife and children. Where in most Muslim families, the birth of a daughter is an occasion of sorrow, I clearly remember his joy at the birth of his own daughter, and his profound grief when she died soon after. Often, it was easy to overlook the fact that Alam had a life outside of his job, simply because he was so completely devoted to our family and his work.

     But I did come to know Alam as a friend, not just a “helper”. It became something of a ritual, that in the morning, I would greet him with the traditional series of questions and answers that made up the typical Afghan greeting: asking rapid-fire about his health, his family’s health, his mood, and invoking blessings upon his household and all that he owned. Then, in an exchange no less formulaic, he would ask me what I wanted for breakfast, even though he knew full well what I’d ask for.

     “Yaw agui gwardum, kha? Sukht wala, teek dey?” I’d say, and I could always be sure that I’d get a fried egg, cooked on both sides so that the yolk wasn’t runny. The process never varied, until, of course, I left for the States.

     I think the main thing I learned from Uncle Alam was to take pride in work, even never-ending and difficult work. Alam always did everything with an “elbow-grease” work ethic, and everything he did, he took a lot of pride in. Everything he did, he did well.

     There were some times when Alam would have had a good reason to lose his temper, but he never once did. He was always patient and gentle, replying to my and my siblings' brattiest scuffles with only a soft “khaternak, khaternak” (“dangerous, dangerous”). He showed by example a strong maturity and grounding in common sense.

     The last time I saw Alam was at a small, dirty airport in Peshawar, Pakistan. I hugged him one last time and bid him goodbye with the traditional Afghan wishes for peace and prosperity, like I’d done for every morning I can remember.

The Ghost of Christmas As It Once Was

The Ghost of Christmas As It Once Was haunts us, every one. Everybody looks for it, everybody fancies they have found it (it is usually mistaken for a religious sermon, or its more secular cousin, the bumper sticker) and everyone loses sight of it somewhere in mid-January. It shows up in Christmas lists. It makes the news. It is both sentimental and tragic, all at once. It is what makes a mother squeak with joy (I saw this holy and lovely sight at work the other day) because she has found the Perfect Socks for her newborn, and it is what makes a picture of people trampled under shopping mobs go viral. It can be, to boil it down, hard to put a fist around what Christmas means, and to separate that from what it is supposed to mean, and whether the difference between the two is worth the fuss it provokes every year.

I think the fuss boils down to this: The Ghost of Christmas as It Once Was is for some of us, quite alive, excitingly real and as genuinely human as too much fruitcake. We get protective, because we believe in and live in a story, but a Truthful one. So there are people who lie or disagree about what the story means. But so what? Nobody falls for fool's gold who hasn't once seen the real thing; the dim and empty remnants of what is True and Good and Right and Holy are not the real thing, to be sure, but just because the much-clutched and kissed photograph of your dearest darling can't clutch and kiss you back is no reason to throw the blessed thing away.

And so there is materialism and greed and political differences and people forgetting (or outright changing) what we believe is the (sigh) real meaning of Christmas. Christmas changes and for some of us who believe, that can be frightening. Think of all the time and money we spend trying to stop it from changing! (Of course, we call it tradition, and that makes it okay). Heaven help us if we haven't got every present wrapped, every side dish warmed and every wineglass filled at the exact moment tradition demands it be. But so what?

That is what I've thought of today. Christmas is a little different this year; not badly different, not tragically different. But different anyhow. But, thanks be to God, so what? Every day is Christmas in the soul snatched from the dogs of despair and hell. This wasn't a Christmas like I thought it would be, and that's just the smallest bit sad. But the Ghost of Christmas As It Once Was, if he's jogged my elbow this year, has also taken my hand and pointed me to a Christmas quite a bit longer ago- a Christmas quite enough like this one to make me pensive. Christmas back then (in that magical era we're trying to recover) was different. Christmas was just another day, and some of us felt not quite at home, and a few of us weren't keeping the annual traditions because a very bothersome census had us lugging our pregnant wife around to jump through some bureaucratic hoops. The Ghost of Christmas As It Once Was has haunted many of us since then, whether we see it in ourselves or not. But the Ghost of Christmas As It Always Will Be beats him hands down, backwards, backwards, forwards and six ways till Sunday.
It wasn't the same that year. And every solitary day, thanks be to God, was never the same after that.


One morning like the others in a town just like the rest
In a tavern by the street that led no where
A mother, like the others, finally stopped to catch her breath
Her child's father(still a stranger) bent with care.

Two people like the others from a line just like the rest,
In a country small and puny in the world,
Bewildered with the dice of life that shook them out this test:
That God would trust this simple man and girl.

A stable, like the others, with the usual stink and mess
With the prying eyes of sheep and goats and cows,
A rather clumsy midwife does his poor and clumsy best
And manages to change the world somehow.

It's Christmas, like the others, with the usual fuss and stress
And the busyness of getting versus giving
And the racing and the wasting makes the best of us confess
To somewhat less a magic mode of living.

We are people like the others: without title, without name
And with no great marks to speak of, save our woe.
But to these others came a Father who loved them just the same,
One Christmas like no other, not so very long ago.

Pappy

This was a speech I wrote for speech class in college. Pretty awesomely, it went on to win a prize at the inaugural writer's symposium of that college a few months later.

I think everyone has a relative that stands out, someone who has done things that happen to be a part of what we call "history". As an aspiring historian, I wrote this speech really trying to commemorate, to record, to remember, a unique individual who lived life on his own terms.

There’s a story in our family (completely true, by the way) that my father’s grandfather once knocked out the Golden Gloves boxing champion with one punch. For a long time, I got this story mixed up: I was sure my grandfather had done it.

Williams Byron Gilmore —Pappy, to me—has always been a fighter; both by trade and by personality. He was a bomber pilot, racking up 127 combat missions, mostly in the Vietnam War, and ultimately retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. And, as he never tired of reminding us, he wasn’t just any bomber pilot: Pappy flew the B-58 “Hustler”, the world’s first supersonic bomber, capable of over Mach 2. It took a special breed of pilot to work with a plane that could pass 8 football fields in one second. You didn’t fly these things without serious skill, serious smarts and serious guts. You didn’t fly these things much, period. B-58 crews were the Air Force elite, handpicked from other strategic bomber squadrons. Pappy, with his “take no prisoners or guff, either” attitude, seemed born for the job.

Pappy was born in 1930, on November 18th. I, of course, wouldn’t meet him until much later. My first memories of him (forever captured on videotape) are images of him at play: my brother and I are wrestling him to the carpet, shrieking with laughter punctuated by his growling “Rowf! Rowf!” That is Pappy: he throws himself into life, and if it involves a fight along the way, so much the better.
Beyond these memories, it can sometimes be hard to say how well I actually know my grandfather.


Pappy’s a man that kept his business to himself and expected you to do the same. Most of my knowledge of him comes from stories—stories that my dad told me, or much more rarely, stories from Pappy himself. The Bill Gilmore of these stories is quite the character: a man who could outsmart, out-fight and out-cuss anyone. But these stories, as does the time spent in the company of the man himself, also reveal a steel-bound determination, and above all, a giant personality. Pappy, in his own way, is a legend.
In fact, even before he took to blasting around in supersonic bombers, one of his hobbies was racing cars. One day, some poor sap pulled up and revved his engine at Pappy in his bright red Austin Healey Sprite. Pappy, in true Bill-Gilmore fashion, let the guy stay neck-and-neck for a stretch, then flashed a wicked grin at his hapless opponent, put the car in fifth gear and tore off into the distance.


Much of our relationship has been at a bit of distance, both because Pappy has never been one for sentimentality and because he was never very thrilled about my parents’ decision to raise his grandkids on the mission field, least of all in Pakistan. I knew him then mostly through the rare letter to the family and the semi-regular birthday card. He usually signed them “Love, Pappy”, or sometimes “Love you fiercely”. I always loved it when he did that; it seemed so in character. Even his love was fierce.



To me, Pappy has always been a figure to respect. His gritty self-reliance is remarkable. He never asked anyone for anything. That’s why, even after his wife died, and his drinking raged out of control, he never asked for help. And that’s why, when his long history of drinking caught up to him, it was strange to see him so helpless. He had always been rightly proud of how he kept in knotty good shape – he didn’t stop lifting weights until he was well into older age, and regularly won seniors’ golf tournaments—but the drinking sucked the life right out of him. His weight dropped to 120 pounds, clinging loosely to his shrinking 5’3 frame. His insides, inflamed with drink, refused to function, and he would yell with the sharp pains that shot through his stomach.
Pappy, like every other time he faced a challenge, beat this one. My parents drove to his home in Florida and brought him to ours in Franklin. Pappy started to kick his addiction, sitting in a recliner like some wizened autocrat and watching Westerns, all the while giving his incomparable commentary on the weather, the food and the fact that his rations of Scotch were getting steadily smaller. His appetite came back, and he was more often, in his particular parlance, “hungry enough to eat the hind end out of a rag doll”. His pugnacity seemed to seep into his life, as if no such puny thing as a drinking habit could stand in the way of the force of nature that was Williams Byron Gilmore. He might get knocked down, but you could put down money that he’d answer the next bell. And that is what I respect about him.

Pappy has made a life out of fighting. His classic threat “I’ll kick your butt until your nose bleeds” sums up so much of his character, but also the way that that character has powered him through the challenges he’s faced. He’s not afraid of a challenge; he relishes it. Pappy meets life head on, full-speed at Mach 2. He doesn’t just live life—he sits immovably in the pilot’s seat, and let me tell you: he’s done it with serious skill, serious smarts and serious guts.

Libraries: A Personal History

In honor of National Library Worker's Day:

I suppose it was nothing to be terribly proud of, back then. No, at our tiny missionary school in Peshawar, Pakistan, there was definitely something weird about the way, when our rusty old school-bell rang for recess, that I would run in the opposite direction from the other kids. They ran to the tiny room outside where we kept our motley assortment of cricket bats, basketballs and jump ropes. I ran further inside the school building towards the back, to the drafty room that served double-duty as assembly hall and library.
I fell in love with libraries, at first, out of pure necessity. In our school, as in so many others, pecking order was established, at least among the boys, through athletic talent. Popularity rose and fell, cliques formed and disbanded, in time with the waxing and waning of certain sports fads. One week, soccer was in, and the wirier and faster among us ruled, if not with an iron fist, then with a nimble foot. The next, basketball took its place and left the chunkier of us red-faced with exertion, embarrassment or both. I don’t remember exactly when I threw in the towel on the whole thing, but I felt ever so much better when I did. The library was waiting.

The library didn’t, however, exactly put together a welcoming committee. Indeed, there was hardly even a staff. You checked out books by scribbling your name in a tattered notebook by the door, but returning materials functioned on the honor system and due dates were flexible, to say the least. It was a musty-smelling room but well-lit, with wall-to-wall carpeting in a dramatic shade of red that seemed designed to match the rug burns it gave when you scooted across it. I liked that room. It became mine, by geeky default, because everyone else was outside playing. That suited me just fine. I started out just reading. Binge reading, really; “The Berenstain Bears”, from start to end. Back issues of “Ranger Rick” magazine. The Black Stallion series, but not from start to end, because we were missing a quarter of them. I even started out on a few “real books”: Black Beauty, Misty of Chincoteague, The Island of Blue Dolphins, Oliver Twist, all of Jules Verne, all of Mark Twain. I wasn’t trying to be brainy. I just grew up out of some books and into other books, and the feeling was as natural, comfortable and satisfying as trading in your too-small shoes for the right size.
My hours in the library were simply a good time, maybe the first time I had ever really intentionally set out to sit down and read. I remember that very clearly: this time was mine to do with it exactly as I liked, and that was reading. I started thinking of reading as something more significant than a hobby. I’d always gotten books for birthdays and Christmases, but I thought of them as a back-up option in case there was nothing good on TV. At some point, stretched indolently on the dark red carpet, I developed a habit. Books, I learned, were headily, happily addictive.

There were other things I’d be learning. As the weather changed – got too cold, or as was more often the case in Pakistan, too hot – other kids drifted into my library. I don’t think I resented this. There were no stats, but the checkout notebook got fuller and more tattered, and I enjoyed seeing which books came and went. I knew nothing about circulation trends or patron surveys, but I began noticing patterns. When soccer was the playground fad, a British soccer novel called “Here We Go!” was in constant motion, bouncing from person to person. I felt a small, secret joy at knowing this; it gave me some sort of leverage (mostly imaginary) over the more outgoing kids, who’d ask me where to find things, or what other books on soccer we had. I knew nothing about the political aspect of librarianship either, nothing about issues of censorship or free expression or readership feedback, but I laughed when I noticed that words like “durn” and “heck” were blacked out in all the books. I wondered what the point of having “I Hate Your Guts, Ben Brewster” in the library was if I wasn’t allowed to read it. This knowledge, these questions, fascinated me. They meant that there were answers; answers about books. They meant there was another world out there, where books were bread and water to people who could spend hours, lives, careers, involved with reading and helping other people read.

I came a little closer to that world when we moved to America. Here of course, they actually had public libraries, not attached to schools. That was a somewhat new experience to me, and very exciting. There were buildings stuffed corner-to-corner with books and all it took to take them home was a library card. The social significance of libraries became importantly clear to me. The local library in Franklin, situated in the middle of the lower-income housing, seemed to offer its free services to exactly the people who needed it most. Information, the great equalizer, was there for the taking. The seeming inexhaustibility of the Franklin Library drove home to me the power of knowledge in a deeply visceral way; the very vastness of the materials available was, more than I could articulate, a lesson in education: it taught me how much there was to learn and how much I didn’t know yet, and it showed me the faint beginnings of the paths to learning what I wanted to know.

These paths, I’d come to learn, weren’t dizzying alleys, but structured highways, with exits, connections and overpasses – even stop signs and traffic lights. The beginning of my sophomore year of college, I began working in the school library to pay some of my tuition. I was in the library once again and as always, but this time from the other side of the desk. This, then, was a library: a living, organic, functional entity, with rules and customs and traditions; not the petty censoriousness of my elementary school library, nor yet the stifling straitlaced places of popular imagination. There were rules to follow and reasons for following them. There was a system in place that powered the beautiful efficiency I associated with the library, as well as the plenitude that I loved. I would come to learn this system and to love it as I loved the results of it. I found that comforting, in a way. It rooted my passionate love of books to a certain system that would guide me wherever I wanted to go. And the places to go were endless.

Back then, it might not have been something to be all that proud of. Libraries were, and still are, seen as musty places haunted by stern matrons with knitting needles embedded in their hair. The dire portents of Kindles and audiobooks and decimated budgets and shrinking readerships sound ominously in the distance. They’re only books, after all, and they are going to have to adapt to the changing of times. But if there’s one thing I learned (even only by osmosis) in our bedraggled little library in Peshawar, Pakistan, it’s that libraries are amazingly resilient places, because they adapt to demand, no matter how petty. They will remain bastions of free thought, forums for discussion, exemplars of egalitarianism, and one of those rare instances where selflessness makes a practical positive impact in the life of the community: nobody’s getting rich off the library, but everybody’s better off anyway. I certainly was. The libraries in my life have opened the door for a love of thinking and ideas, and then provided an endless supply of ideas to think about. Now, as a part of a library system, I take pride in the responsibility of providing information to people. Libraries, at their heart, are about community and connection: repositories of shared experiences, accessible through shared resources. Libraries allow us to read others’ stories and share them with each other. In giving me the chance to read so many other people’s stories, libraries have become a significant part of my own, and taught me the significance of stories in general. That might just be something to be proud of after all.

Inaugural Post: Cut the ribbon, break the seal, drive the golden stake...

...it's here. Welcome to Another Stay of Execution, the literary blog of Nathan Gilmore.

It was that great 20th-century philosopher Dustin Hoffman who said "A good review is just another stay of execution".
Whether or not the chair awaits the unfortunate author who falls afoul of Nathan Gilmore is up for debate (much of it heated and acrimonious, I'm sure), but here I am. I am one voice among the multitudes, but I may perhaps sing an off note at the end of the song and fill the embarrassed silence that follows with something worthwhile.

I am a writer, a sometime librarian, a sometime literature student, and an insatiable reader. Here will be found the opinions of one English-majoring, book-collecting, poetry-attempting, lyric-dabbling, ex-missionary kid pertaining to librarianship, reading, and writing, as well as in-depth book reviews of whatever book I happen to be reading. The occasional original poem, essay or song, as well as the inevitable rant, the odd rave, and the semi-regular thoughts concerning book collecting may also be forthcoming.

The broadest connection between the topics here is literary. Anything related to the art of the written word (that I decide to have an opinion on) will be what I stew over and slap down here for any and all to see. Sometimes the connections will be more obvious than other times, but I hope fellow readers, writers and book collectors find something here that inspires, irritates, or otherwise impresses them- enough so that discussion might ensue and be worthwhile.

Again, welcome. I look forward to sharing and discussing with you.