I yelled at the Chorale. In 23 years of directing the Chorale I never remember yelling at them. I am often irritated by them but I don’t let that show. I’m a singer and I know how to take a deep breath. I often raise my voice over them to get their attention, but that’s not done with irritation. The combination of irritation and a raised voice equals yelling at and I simply do not do that.

Afterwards everyone said it wasn’t that bad but I felt like I had turned into my mother at her most abrasive. I was embarrassed and it took me a while (two days) to get over it. So I had to ask myself, “How on earth did you get to this point?”

It’s been a demanding quarter. It began with more new people than we usually get and many of them were bewildered and disoriented. New people often think they are the only ones who don’t know what’s going on. One of them clearly blamed me for the fact that he was new and that bothered me for weeks.

Then the wife of one of our baritones died. It wasn’t unexpected but it was heart-wrenching for those of us who knew them. She was a lovely person and a sensitive photographer. Over the years she had taken many photos of the Chorale in action.

I had a period of domestic difficulties. I hurt my back while heaving wood around. Rats got into the ceiling one stormy night and sounded like they were setting up a bowling alley in which they proceeded to bowl. A trapper who looked like NRA Man and his assistant, a tall skinny guy who could have been one of the Darryls from the Bob Newhart Show rescued me.

Then Hal, our beloved bass, unexpectedly died. He went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up. I was stunned by the news. I went into a crazed period that reminded me of the months around my mother’s death—also in November—eight years ago. I organized the Chorale to sing at the memorial service with an obsession that worried me when I occasionally breathed the air of self-awareness.

I started waking up in the middle of the night, sobbing. This was not just about Hal and my mother. This was about my cat Freudy who also died unexpectedly last May in bed, in the middle of night. I went into that surreal grief place where I feel like I am trying to run underwater. Everyday life became slow and difficult.

I chose this particularly hectic period to finally purchase a cell phone. After it came a friend pointed out I could have gotten a Smart Phone for the same price. It seemed as though my life depended on getting an upgrade immediately and that demanded a second session of customer service calls.

I now have the phone and I am committed to spending half an hour a day or until I start crying –whichever comes first– learning how to use it. Don’t call me yet and for god’s sake, no texts.

A good college friend had a surgical procedure that developed complications. Instead of one week in the hospital, he was there for two. When he finally went home, it was only for two days before he had to be air lifted from Walla Walla back to the hospital in Everett where, as of this writing, he remains. For days I expected to hear that he had died, but he is very much alive and looks cheerful.

The OK Chorale usually has two performances at the end of a quarter, occasionally three if two are on the same day. With expansive optimism I had scheduled six (6!) this year. Hal’s memorial service made for a somber seventh.

Nina (rhymes with Dinah) drove us to the second of the six performances. A good friend had confided that he was being tested for cancer and it didn’t look good. I didn’t think I could hear any more from anyone about anything. As we pulled into the lot of Columbia Lutheran Home Nina told me she had double-booked into something she couldn’t get out of and she’d have to miss the third performance.

And that was the last I saw of my equilibrium.

Our third performance was to be at Fred Lind Manor on Capitol Hill and the only thing keeping me upright was the thought that at the very least I wouldn’t have to drive to Capitol Hill and park and show up all merry and bright. I was so tired of being merry and bright.

“Oh, that’s okay,” I said. “I’ll manage.”

In the Luther Room (great acoustics, fabulous piano) of Columbia Lutheran Home someone fussed up to me, “You didn’t tell us when to get here. This was the only performance where you didn’t tell us when to get here.”

I looked at him. I looked at the clock. 6:30. I looked at the OK Chorale milling around like a bunch of fifth graders. Excitement leaped from them and from my inquisitor, whirling and spinning and turning into anxiety where it settled in me. Did this matter now?

I sang some high notes to get their attention. Some of them stopped talking.

Then as I recall, events went something like this:

“Let’s get warmed up.”

We ran through some scales and the beginnings of the songs in the order I had them in my notebook. Chatter, rattling of pages, and comparing notebooks broke out between songs.

“There’s some anxiety about the order of songs,” Susan said.

(Oh good god, how many times have I gone over the order of songs, how many e-mails, how many hard copies, how many oral walks through the fucking order of songs?)

“The order of songs is what it has always been.”

“When did you move “Feast of Lights” to be second?” Britt asked

“It’s always been where it is.”

“No it hasn’t.”

(Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!) “Did you read the e-mail?”

“Which one?”

While everyone who was actually listening began re-arranging their music, I rummaged for a hard copy of the order of songs and in restraining myself from crumpling it in a ball and throwing it at her, I happened to notice that “Feast of Lights” was not second. It was fifth. It had been fifth except for the Monkey Lighting the week before when we did a shortened program.

Oh god, it was my mistake. I apologized and tried to laugh at myself. Merily came up and put her hand on my arm.

“Don’t worry, you just call them and we’ll sing them!” she said cheerfully.

I wanted to throw her gracious hand off me. I didn’t want anyone to be nice to me. I wanted to go home.

Jessica swooped in with some urgency, “Are we singing the German first on Silent Night even though it’s last on the audience song sheet?”

That was when I heard a shriek, “STOP TALKING!!” It was my mother’s voice but it was coming out of my mouth.

Everyone stopped talking just the way they did when my mother entered a room at full force. Just what I wanted for Christmas: to turn into my mother.

We carried on and eventually I got over myself. Our seven performances went beautifully. What stands out in my mind now is Merily’s graciousness and everyone’s generosity. I wouldn’t say I feel merry and bright and it will a long time before I want to hear another fa la la. This is the time to breathe in the line from “O Little Town of Bethlehem:

“Silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given.”

The OK Chorale lost one of our long time singers three days ago. Quite unexpectedly, Hal, our resident funnyman, died in his sleep. He was cheeky, irreverent, and a reliable bass with a lovely voice. When I got the news, I went trawling through my blog posts to find the ones he had starred in. It took me 24 hours to start sobbing. Now I’m on the other side of that.

Hal’s life intersected with members of the OK Chorale at the opera, the symphony, the ballet, and at baseball games. In fact he was recruited into the Chorale from a baseball game many years ago. The following vignettes are drawn from past posts:

The Chorale quarter begins with everyone introducing themselves and answering a question that I put to them.

One January the question was “Tell us your name and something you got for Christmas. My name is Elena and I got these earrings.”

We went around the room:
“I’m Jim and I got a lovely case of Syrah.”

“My name is Ruthie and I got some expensive dog biscuits.” And after a brief silence: “They were for my dog.”

Mel’s ear was prominently bandaged. “I had surgery for skin cancer,” he informed us.

When we came round to Nina (rhymes with Dinah), she said, “I got skin cancer for Christmas, too.” She had had a small patch removed above one eye.

Hal in the bass section—our inimitable Hal—turned around in his chair and said “Where do the two of you shop?!”

Let’s take a little break and review all the reasons “Good King Wenceslas” is a great carol. From a piano teacher’s point of view, it’s an easy one for beginners, especially small children who have just started learning piano in September. That’s about it. Or that’s what I thought when I asked The OK Chorale which traditional carols they wanted to sing this quarter and Hal suggested “Good King Wenceslas.”

I couldn’t imagine anything more boring. Melodically two of the lines in each of the five verses are exactly the same. Rhythmically the song is nearly all quarter notes, which means it yaps along like an annoying little dog.

“It’s boring,” I said

“It’s a dialogue,” he said

I looked at it again. I read the verses. “It’s a little play,” I thought, “Hmmm.”

Still I was only willing to do the carol on condition that we come up with a way to break the musical monotony. I made a list of all the nouns in the song and put out a request for props. I asked Hal if his granddaughters who have yearly enjoyed the OK Chorale Christmas concerts would want to participate.

He reported back the next week. “They’re in,” he said. “We’re arguing over who gets to be king.”

Hal was crowned king.

Wenceslas was not actually a king. He was just a duke. Still the carol says that the Good King looks out his window at the moonlit snow on St Stephen’s Day. He sees a Poor Man gathering wood for a fire. He gets the neighborhood scuttlebutt on the Poor Man from his Page. The two of them set out with bread, wine, and meat, plodding through the wind and snow to the Poor Man’s dwelling. By verse four the Rude Wind has kicked up and the Page says he can’t continue. The Good King tells him to walk in his footsteps and so they continue. The song ends with the mild suggestion that when we bless the poor, we ourselves are blessed.

By mid-quarter we had assembled our props and the Dramatis Personae had been decided. Hal was the King, Kelsey would play The Poor Man, and Brianna would be The Page. Good King Wenceslas turned out to be my favorite part of the OK Chorale show that quarter:

Good King Wenceslas, a Treatment:

Five white sheets cover an area in front of the stage, not deep and crisp, just white. Strewn about are sticks and small logs from this year’s supply of wood for my wood stove. Anne (alto) holds a fan with crepe paper streaming from it in the direction of the audience so they can appreciate the ambiance. Nina (soprano) cuts most of the hall lights.

The rude wind

Verse One: At first mention of the moon, a powerful flashlight from Hal’s glove compartment is turned upon the side wall by Kathleen in the soprano section. The Good King sees The Poor Man gathering up sticks.

Verse Two: The Page appears dressed in a Robin Hood hat supplied by Chris (tenor) and wearing an outfit made of magazine pages (pages, get it?) designed by the girls’ mother, Monika.

Verse Three: The Page and the Good King get together a wine bottle supplied by Anne, and the rubber chicken supplied by Sandi (alto) that doubles as one of the French hens for “The Twelve Days After Christmas.” At first mention of the wind, Jody (soprano) Eileen and Chris ( tenors) and Kristin ( alto) fan the air (mostly in the direction of the director at the piano.)

Verse Four: The Wind becomes Rude. Jody, Eileen, Chris and Kristin fan more furiously.

Verse Five: The Page clomps across the snow in a pair of Hal’s shoes, trodding in The Master’s footsteps.

Jody, Chris, Eileen, and Kristin, having transubstantiated the fans into instruments of blessing, pronounce one.

The page and Good King Wenceslas

I told Hal that Kelsey and Brianna were welcome to do something with us every Christmas until they start adolescing. I love this group. Something wonderful always happens and I always feel blessed with them. The transubstantiated fans just put the crown on it.

Last Christmas we did “A Holiday Feast for a Hungry Choir” (by Lee G. Barrow) The Treatment was choreographed, cast, and directed by Hal. It opens with a poem explaining that the choir has been so busy performing that it hasn’t had time to eat. Weak with hunger, the choir free associates food into the carols.
Instead of the “ding dong, ding dong” in “Carol of the Bells,” the choir sings about Hostess Ding-Dongs. Instead of “Bring a Torch, Jeannette Isabella,” they sing “Bring a torte, Annette Isabella.” “O come let us adore Him” became “O come let us all gorge then.”

Throughout the medley of Christmas songs was a recurring theme of figgy pudding, which necessitated a magnificent prop: a 12-pound non-edible figgy pudding, looking every ounce like the real thing. It cost $75. We took up a collection to defray the expense and I am now the custodian of it along with the OK Chorale’s boar’s head.

Kelsey and Brianna played the parts of Annette Isabella and Not Annette Isabella. They produced the figgy pudding on cue and salted the audience with Hostess ding dongs at the end of the song.

“Next year, I want to do songs from the Grinch, Hal can be the Grinch and one of you can be Cindy Lou Who and we’ll mousse your hair straight up.”

“No one’s touching my hair,” Brianna said.

In the spring of last year, one of Hal’s cohorts in the bass section prodded me to do “The Lumberjack Song” starring—of course—Hal. I didn’t write a post about it but I remember there was a beard and a bra involved and some confused senior citizens in our audiences. However we did an impromptu visit to a skilled nursing facility and sang it for a woman with Parkinson’s who was mostly confined to a bed.

Hal sat down alongside of her and began conversationally, “You know, I never wanted to be a singer.”

And so we began. When we got to the line “I cut down trees, I eat my lunch, I go to the lavat’ry,” Hal matter-of-factly gestured to the little potty chair next to the bed. Leone gazed at him, rapt. It was magic.

This quarter we have been rehearsing “You’re a Mean One, Mr Grinch,” and had put out a call for props. We planned to get wigs for the girls so no one would have to touch Brianna’s hair. We will put the song to rest. I don’t want to do it now.

The OK Chorale has a potluck rehearsal every quarter. It’s a chance to get better acquainted with the people we sing with. Years ago in a misguided effort to foster comradery, I said, “If there’s someone in the Chorale who annoys you, you might use the potluck to get better acquainted with him or her. Sometimes that helps reduce. . .”

I was drowned out by the explosion of laughter. So I did what I often do when I’m too much in earnest. I started re-explain myself and ended up saying exactly the same thing which resulted in another assault of laughter while a few people –tenors, I think– began acting out the parts of Annoyed and Annoying Person.

At the potluck, Terry (alto) sat down next to Chris (tenor) and said, “I’m supposed to sit next to an annoying person and Hal isn’t here.”

When I reported this last comment to Hal, he grinned, gave me a thumbs up and said “I still got it!”

Wherever Hal is now, whoever he is annoying, amusing, wherever he is being irreverent, I have no doubt he’s still got it even yet.

Our Hal

Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about just about everything is home after what felt like six weeks but was only half that long. She was doing the European thing while I was home on Lucy duty. Lucy is her 15 year old gray and white with smudged-nosed cat.

When Gwen goes away, she sets Le Bistro to dispense a measured amount of cat food at the same time every morning so a person doesn’t need to actually feed Lucy on a daily basis. But I’m a person who works at home; I am besieged by my cats all day long so I have perhaps a jaundiced view of how much interaction a cat actually needs. I try to at least get a sighting of Lucy every day.

When I visit Lucy she always comes out to say either ‘hello’ or ‘why the hell are you interrupting me,’ plays keep-away around the legs of the butcher block table, watches me change her water, waits to see if I have a treat and then disappears. If she’s feeling particularly fetching, she rolls on her back on the rug. This could be misconstrued as a social invitation but if I attempt to engage her when she’s rolling on her back, it only offends her.

Gwen had gotten her suitcase out a week and half before she left. Some of the experts tell you to do this. Cats get alarmed when they see the suitcase but if it’s sitting there for a week and half, the thinking is that it becomes part of the landscape and it loses its charge. Don’t you believe it. Cats are not that stupid. Gwen reported that Lucy got clingier at the run-up to departure. Gwen usually keeps intimate rituals with her cat private so I deduced from this outpouring that Lucy was in a bad way and that tugged at my heart.

The first morning I went over I couldn’t find Lucy for a good ten minutes. Finally I spotted a lump under a blanket move ever so slightly. There she was huddled into her barren and loveless life. I cooed and petted her but she turned away. The second morning was much like the first.

The third morning I took my computer with me, settled into a window armchair, and accessed Gwen’s superior wireless network. I checked my email, wrote a few notes, deleted a lot of stuff, looked at my bank balance, and played a few moves of Scrabble on Facebook. When I got up to leave I saw that Lucy had been sitting in back of me, watching.

The fourth morning I took my computer and a thermos of tea. As I went about my business, Lucy walked past me. I heard her go out the cat flap that takes her from the kitchen to the basement stairs. I heard a meow. Quite an indignant one. As I was leaving I opened the door to the basement. There was Lucy sitting four steps down in a patch of sunlight. She meowed at me and I said Goodbye.

The fifth morning I had my computer, my tea and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. As I was reading and sipping, two little feet appeared on the blanket beside me. I watched Lucy as she sniffed the air, the blanket, and the edge of the book. I went back to my story. The sixth morning, Lucy curled up by my knee and pretended to not notice me. I pretended to not notice her.

Finally the day came when Lucy dislodged Sherlock Holmes and fell asleep in my lap. I stayed especially long that morning. Thereafter she was waiting for me on the chair when I came in the door. She would leap down so I could settle in, then leap back up and take over my life. I did a lot of reading, thinking and emailing last month with Lucy in my lap. And playing Scrabble. And Yahtzee. And one of those Jacqui Lawson games where you explode balls. The morning of the day Gwen came home, after Lucy fell asleep on me I watched three episodes of Frasier on Netflix.

The mornings with Lucy had become a cherished routine. The only part of this intimate ritual I am keeping private is how many salmon treats I gave Lucy. Gwen reads my blog posts.

Lucy as a kitten before she got the smudged nose

My two choirs began last week. I’m not sure what prescience caused me to be more than usually prepared with the music, the schedule and the quarter routine but I shudder to think what the first rehearsals would have been like if I hadn’t been.

The OK Chorale has been singing for 23 years. It’s still a University of Washington Experimental College class but there is a core of 20-25 people who come back quarter after quarter so that it functions more like a community choir. However to keep my catalog listing, not to mention my monopoly on 4-part choirs in the Experimental College, everyone has to register with the University every quarter. Two weeks before the beginning of the quarter I send out emails begging everyone to register early so that I will know how many copies of the music we’ll need.

It used to be that the location of classes was a dark secret. You found out where the class was held after your registration fee had been paid. The internet makes that impossible now. As a result, there were fifteen more people than I expected at the first rehearsal, most of them first timers. One man who didn’t read music was clearly worried that I wouldn’t be able to accommodate him. Several women said they had never sung in a choir before. Someone else wasn’t sure whether he sang high or low. I directed traffic like an old fashioned cop, a smile pasted on my face, sweat forming at my hairline.

When we got everyone settled down, I abandoned my original plan to start with an unknown piece—so that everyone would get hopelessly lost together instead of the recidivists out-singing the new people and the new people having flashbacks to when they weren’t in the most popular clique at school. Instead we started with an arrangement of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” which involved a lot of unison singing.

I thought this would be easy. But first I found I had to make sure that the non-music readers knew they were not alone and that many in the group learn their part by hearing it since I go over things –god help me-what feels like a hundred times a week. Then I had to explain to people who weren’t used to choir music which line was their line. Then I made my little joke about not assuming anyone, including me, actually knew what we were doing. (I think only other teachers in the Chorale realize how much I fly by the seat of my pants.)

This particular arrangement of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” begins with typed music but then morphs into handwritten music. I do this a lot. I know what my group (and I) can manage and what we can’t so I am forever truncating and re-writing things. One gentleman was completely thrown when the visual look of the music changed from typed to printed music. When we finished reading through the piece he was turning his pages over and over and looking not at all merry. He looked overwhelmed and well, angry. When I tried to smooth things over he more or less barked at me.

That was the point I stopped babying people and decided that for the rest of the rehearsal—ah geez, 45 minutes left—everyone would have to cope on his own. My clothes were almost soaked through.

I went home that night and had a Scotch. The next morning something told me to take it easy and not do anything taxing—like calling Comcast or Premera–before leaving for All Present, my song circle for people with ESML (early stage memory loss) which began at 10:30. I made a cup of coffee and watched a couple of episodes of Frasier.

I arrived early at the Greenwood Senior Center. Copies of new songs had been printed and punched and were waiting to be inserted into the songbooks. There were six new standards and four new musical comedy songs. (I add new songs mostly for myself and my assistants. The people in All Present could sing “You are my Sunshine” and “Goodnight, Irene” over and over for an hour and half every week and be perfectly happy.) The sheets had mostly been printed correctly, but I had gotten something wrong so now we had “14.Mr.Sandman” after “13.Anything Goes” in Standards and after and “27. Doin’ What Comes Naturally” in Musicals.

My lovely assistants, Susan and Mike were stuck in traffic. Susan is the brains behind the notebooks. She can figure out how to fix any glitch. She can organize anything. She could organize a 1200 page manuscript underwater if she had to. She’d use clams as paper clips. But she was stuck in traffic.

My other lovely assistants, The Other Susan and Linda with her dog Lucy were also there early. We folded up tables, set out chairs, moved the piano, and got water pitchers. The Other Susan started in trying to figure out where to insert the new song pages. “Mr.Sandman” seemed to be on the back of every page.

Our singers started arriving and it was peculiar feature of the morning that they continued to arrive as late as 45 minutes into the session. Every time someone new showed up, we had to re-arrange the circle to accommodate them: Vivian with her lovely smile that we hadn’t seen since the spring, Jane, the wanderer who always tries to walk off with my tote bag, Jim with the golden voice, Bill who in his younger days as a night club singer opened for Tony Bennett, Violet who at age 90 went to Croatia over the summer and saw her family for the last time, John whose harmonizing tenor wafts over the top of so many of our songs.

There were lots of familiar faces, but there were a lot I had never seen before. And still they kept coming, all with entourages of spouses, caregivers, walkers, and wheelchairs. Susan and Mike finally arrived just in time for Mike to move Violet over three feet because she had sat down just before we needed to expand the circle. Once we get Violet settled no one wants to disturb her.

The group had doubled. There 17 singers and seven caregivers and three spouses that had to stay either next to or close to their charges. There were three wheelchairs and five walkers. There was an extra dog. There was chaos. The room was shrinking. The room was growing hotter and hotter. Someone farted. A big one. We ran out of song sheets. Jane started to wander and had to be seduced back to her chair. During “Easter Parade” someone danced with her. Bob, a center volunteer, came in to ask how many were staying for lunch. When I said I didn’t know, he asked if he could go around and asked everyone.

I wanted to scream, “Can’t you see what I’m dealing with here?”

But I said, “Oh what the hell, sure, go ahead.”

He clearly could see what I was dealing with because he called out,

“Anyone staying for lunch?”

“No,” everyone chorused whether they were or not.

“That’s all I needed to know,” he said cheerfully and exited.

When I went to bed that night I felt like I had been put through the washing machine and the dryer and even then had hung on the line for a time. But two large groups with more singers than I expected: that’s a nice problem to have. It’s good to be back.

Seepage. That’s a word to alert you that this post is not for refined sensibilities. I have been told by people (who don’t know me all that well) that I have refined sensibilities. I used to; over the years I have put aside so much for my cats.

Anyway, ten days ago, early in the morning a long-haired ginger cat appeared outside the sunroom door. I was reading and Winston was curled up on my feet when Artemis went rigid. How her rigidity alerted Winston who was snoring, I don’t understand but the next thing I knew, Winston had leaped off the couch and muscled Artemis aside.

Artemis is a quiet cat who seldom makes a sound. Her meow is a “freep” rarely heard. She has a secret weapon, though: she’s a screamer and it’s all the more effective because she’s usually so self-contained. When Winston interrupted her vigilance over the ginger cat, Artemis screeched like someone was pulling her legs off. Then I nearly leapt off the couch.

When I got myself untangled from the blankets, tea cup, and book, Winston and the ginger cat were face to face like a pitcher and a referee about to altercate. When I tried to distract them, the ginger cat ran but Winston overtook him. A whirling ball of cat bounced across the yard with fur flying in all directions.

The belligerence lasted only about 30 seconds. The whirling fur was stopped by the fence. I shook the hose that was lying in the garden bed, giving Ginger a chance to escape over the wall. Winston huffed and snorted and did a few circles in the grass.

His tail was almost as big as his body, and that is saying a great deal. He’s a big-boned tomcat with a broad face and thick neck. His belly looks as though he had swallowed a basketball. When he walks he slowly dribbles the ball from side to side. His ponderous thud is usually preceded by a highly irritating whine that I have written about before. My neighbor Bill calls him the Dreadnought.

When he calmed down and stopped emitting his fighting odor, I combed over Winston’s head to see what the damage had been. I located a lot of puncture wounds, which I cleaned and left to the air. I visited the wounds every day until they scabbed over. All standard procedure.

I was congratulating myself on being such a capable nurse when a putrid stench became part of the medical follow-ups. I combed all over Winston trying to figure out where the odor was originating. I knew it was an abscess: you never forget that odor. It took nearly two days for me to see that red and brown goo was hanging out of his left ear. To call it goo doesn’t do it justice. It was like a fungus the size of cotton balls. I cleared out the worst of it and washed the area with saline.

Ginger had hooked him in several places in the swirls of his auricle. There was a cut mark, a puncture wound and what looked like an area dotted with shrapnel. I waited for the salt water to do its magic. In a few hours the seepage began: loathesome, yellow gunk oozing out of the cut and coming out of the shrapnel points as though through a sieve, reeking enough to nauseate. It was like one of those horror movies from the 1950s: “It Slimed Out of the Ear.”

Winston’s last great puncture wound had healed quickly as soon as Artemis got involved. She couldn’t get to it fast enough to lick it away as it oozed. But this abscess appeared to be more than she was up for. Either that or she wasn’t into ears. She has her sensibilities, too. She avoided him for a few days. Winston was Philoctetes, the Greek wounded on his way to Troy whose wound stank so badly, they left him on an island. They came back for him, though, because they needed him in the end. Artemis finally curled up to sleep with Winston.

Twice a day I treated the wounds with the saline. Every few hours I went in with a kleenex, cotton ball, gauze, or Q-tip and soaked up whatever the wound had heaved up. The morning was the worst because the abscess drained through the night, and then hardened in the various little curls of the ear.

Winston was oblivious to anything out of the ordinary going on in his body. He demanded his meals on schedule, and whined relentlessly when I forgot his arthritis meds, which he counts as a treat. He still wanted to have his cigarette on the front porch at 9:15 PM. He still scratched incessantly at my bed to go outside at four in the morning.

One morning we had a little repeat of the Ginger cat appearance except that it was a raccoon. It was 6:00 AM and still dark outside. I was in the sun-room, swathed in blankets, reading. Artemis was poised at the sliding door, which was cracked open six inches. I got up to see what the attraction was and there was a raccoon. It retreated when it saw me. From behind the raccoon I heard Winston hiss.

“Ah geez,” I thought. “This cat thinks he’s Steve McQueen.”

Winston shot by the startled raccoon and came toward me. I stepped out, snatched him inside and closed the door. The raccoon ambled around outside the door, inspecting the stacked wood and sniffing at the stump that serves as a booster for the cats to get through the cat flap into the sunroom—that is when the flap is open, which it hasn’t been for years, since the last gift of a giant rat got thumped into the house by, you guessed it, the Dreadnought.

The irony is that Winston is a big baby. He’s a scaredy-cat. He’s actually a bully not over-endowed with brains, which is why he blusters and fights other cats and hisses at raccoons. That a woman of my refined sensibilities ended up with bully for a cat is a source of everlasting shame to me.

“Bite of Broadview” signs are popping up in my neighborhood. They sadden me partly because this particular event used to be called “Christ the King Harvest Festival” and the whole “Bite of” thing is so played and partly because I won’t be going. As I gotten older I’ve contracted a condition called Tofts. It flares up with certain predictable triggers: in crowds, around noise, near parades, trying to find a place to park and at the movies when people talk to each other as though they are sitting in front of their television. TOFTS. It stands for Too Old for This Shit. Its only treatment is to immediately leave the trigger source.

I have looked forward to the “Christ the King Harvest Festival” every year for 25 years. It’s always the third weekend in September. Christ the King is a big Catholic church in Broadview, just north of my Crown Hill neighborhood. I was raised in minimalist (ok, constipated) Protestant churches so it always amazes me what a big-ass affair a wealthy Catholic church can put on. Christ the King Harvest Festival had the usual booths of crafters (one of them dedicated to arty rosaries), and food tents, outdoor barbeque, bake sales, and in later years, a coffee bar.

What set it apart from anything the Protestants ever did –besides rosaries–were the rides. They actually brought in a carousel, Ferris wheel, roller coaster, bumper cars, a crazy house, swings and mild rides for little children. Once you reached the carnival area, there was carnival food: elephant ears, cotton candy and popcorn. I always walked around and marveled at the rides. They were clearly from a different era, old and worn and funky. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn I rode one of these exact rides in the 1960s in Olympia or in the 1950s when there were rides across the street from Bellevue Square.

It was a sensory experience, the Harvest Festival: the smell of popcorn and coffee, the screams coming from the roller coaster, the sight of nuns in habits amongst the grilled corn and face painting. I loved it until two years ago when they brought in a stage, a band and Amplified Sound. It was no longer a sensory experience. It became a Single Sense Experience that was overwhelming even with ear plugs in my ears. I lasted all of a minute and a half before I left. TOFTS.

The Foss Home does an annual farmers’ market at the end of the summer so it’s actually a harvest festival, too. At my first visit several years ago I won a beautiful hand-blown glass vase with my guess that it held 750 Starbursts. 750 Starbursts were the last thing I needed in my house but I was thrilled to have won the beautiful vase. I managed to hold onto the candies until Halloween when I dumped them on my students and the Trick or Treaters.

My friend Kay and I go every year to the Foss Home Farmer’s Market. We buy fruits and vegetables. We take one (at least) of everything that’s free whether we want it or not. Kay chats with vendors. I enter every contest for anything except tickets to sports events. It’s small and fun. But last year there was a stage and a band and someone saying “Testing” into a microphone with an amplification which could be heard in the next county. I couldn’t believe it. The Foss Home is a residential facility for the elderly: is this what they wanted? Why weren’t they too old for this shit? I was out of there before the band got to their first bridge.

My friend Nancy and I visited Seattle Tilth’s Harvest Festival. I parked in front of Nancy’s house and we made the short walk to the Good Shepherd Center, Tilth’s home. Two blocks away I wanted to turn around and go back. I could already hear the band.

“I know you don’t know this but it’s Nirvana,” Nancy said to me.

I know very little but I think she meant that the unholy outpouring from behind all the amps and speakers was a cover of a Nirvana song.

“It’s not Nirvana,” I said. “It’s hell.”

I left Nancy to walk to the far edges of the festival. It was 87 degrees and the sun was in my face. In the surreal atmosphere the vendors seemed like pimps in the Tenderloin, attempting to entice me to their booths as I searched for shade and quiet. After twenty minutes I found Nancy.

“I want to go home.”

“OK,” she said.

Nancy really is a lovely person. She has a husband who responds exactly as I do to noise and to crowds who seem to be making a frenetic attempt to convince themselves they are having fun. She also knows me quite well so my request was no surprise.

Most of my friends would not have been surprised. They often end a description of an event they particularly enjoyed by saying, “You would have hated it.”

My friends are similarly unfazed by my restaurant behavior: Before we’re even seated, I ask for the music to be turned down. After once such request, the waitperson looked at me uncomprehendingly.

“Is it too loud?” she asked.

“Can’t you tell?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I just tune it out.”

I entered Bartell Drugs one Sunday morning, after a lovely quiet walk, to be met with a blast of whiny sounds coming through some lousy amplification system. The clerk on duty claimed to not know how to turn down the “music.”

“We can’t adjust it from here,” she said.

“You’re kidding,” I said. “How do you concentrate?”

“Oh, I just tune it out.”

This begs the question: if it must be tuned out, why is it on at all?

My worst experience along these lines (not counting the Neighbors From Hell who I sold my house to get away from) involved 1) the invasion of my own home and 2) the element of surprise. I was reading under the lilacs on the afternoon of the summer solstice three years ago when my ears were assaulted by a whiny distorted sound that crescendoed, and then receded over and over. The whiny sound was followed by other timbres, other rhythms, similarly distorted. I got up to investigate.

I followed thumps and blares to a house two and a half blocks away where to my dismay I learned that a “music festival” was going on until ten o’clock that night. The current performers were students and amateurs but the professionals, which I took to mean the Greatest Decibels, were coming on at 7:00. I asked the impresario why he hadn’t let anyone know about his Amplified Sound Fest.

“I told everyone in the block,” he said.

“When it’s this loud, you need to let people within a four block radius know,” I said.

“You aren’t into music?” he asked.

I looked at him. I looked at the ground. I looked at him and took a deep breath.

“Yeah, that’s it,” I said. “I’m not into music.”

I sighed, took my TOFTS, and went home to close the windows.

I started writing this post at 10:00 last Sunday morning while sitting in my sun room surrounded by the junk of six households. It was day three of what I was calling my Farewell Yard Sale. It was the last sale I expect to do even though my mean friend (Tim) smirked when I said it to him. The sheer magnitude of stuff mounting up over the past year has been oppressive. And it didn’t help that I was geared up to have all that stuff gone by early June and then it was too hot all summer long to have a sale. Every time I went in my cabin out back to get a chair or folding table, I had to wade through piles and boxes of human detritus.

It’s my own fault, really. First of all there’s my stuff. Then there’s the stuff from my parents’ house that is still here after five years. It’s my (mis)fortune to have the storage space. My neighbor Gwen gives me all kinds of stuff. It’s all high quality because Gwen knows no other—and she knows something about just about everything. Then there’s my neighbor Bill. I’ve been trying for years to interest him into doing a sale with me but he dreads all the work of sorting and deciding. He managed to get together 5 or 6 boxes to unload onto my sale.

My friend Kay went on a serious house clean last year and took a layer off her 40 plus years’ accumulation. For months I got periodic phone calls that began with “Can you use. . .?” followed by a carload of stuff delivered by her partner Jerry who always had a patient if sardonic look on his face. He says he gets nervous when Kay and I get together.

And finally there’s my friend Nancy who has really classy stuff and I actually asked her to treat me like the Goodwill. It wasn’t much farther to come to my house and there was no wait to unload.

It seemed like a good idea at the time but it got a little out of hand. When it came time to set up the sale, I felt overwhelmed. My friend Sue came over at 7 AM on Thursday and did a bunch of heavy lifting. She moved all my plants out of the sun room and set up tables. She put the saw horses and a sheet of plywood outside. Then she piled all the boxes of junk in the middle of the sun room so I could start unpacking and setting up. Bill brought over another set of saw horses and plywood. Thirteen tables full of stuff. Full. The plywood was bowing in the middle.

It’s now been a week since the sawhorses went up. I have taken two carloads of stuff to Value Village. The last of the sale is sitting outside my house with a free sign on it. My sun room is looking spacious and empty and ready to fill up with my watercolor class, which starts next week. My back hurts. These are signs that this probably is my last sale.

I used to do a spook house every year in the cabin. A few moms of my students helped black it out and arrange some scary tableaux. It got quite complicated as the years went on. We had a fog machine and a full size coffin that Gwen volunteered to lie in and raise up from. It got to be so much work that often it was still up in April. Eventually I had to go back there, fight through all the fake cobwebs, and dismantle it. Finally it was enough and I sold the coffin.

I’ve been doing some species of yard sale every year since the late 80s.  My Farewell Sale ran for four days, Friday through Monday of Labor Day weekend. I had nice little pile of cash at the end, half of which was made by noon on the first day. But the money is only part of the appeal. There’s the Playing Store aspect. I get a huge kick out of that. Then there’s the fact that people actually pay money to take large, hideous, and awkward items off my property. And there’s the entertaining parade of humanity that troops in and out.

My friends dropped by with coffee in the morning (Nancy) and soup in the afternoon (Nina). Gwen popped over before I had time to hide the things she has given me that weren’t necessarily meant for the sale. Bill was in and out a few times. My nice friend (Tim) came to say hi and collect all the apples that had fallen off the tree. He makes the most succulent apple butter imaginable. He helped me collect my cardboard street signs at the end of the second day because it was expected to rain that night.

The first shoppers to arrive are always the retired men and women looking for gold and silver jewelry. They know each other from yard and estate sales all over the area. I myself have a fair number of Regulars, people that come every year to see the garden and to see if I am selling something they can’t do without.

“I don’t see anything I can’t do without,” they say.

“You’re missing the whole point,” I say.

Book dealers and book lovers spend a lot of time in the book room and often come out and ask for a box. Besides walls of mystery, fiction, history and humor, I have complete sets of the World Book Encyclopedia, the colorful Golden Book Encyclopedia, and a partial set of Funk and Wagnalls’ Encyclopedia. It’s partial because I started using its pages to light my wood stove when I stopped taking the New York Times. Yes, that’s right: I burn books.

The Book Room

I love the middle aged women who slowly collect an enormous pile, commenting all the while on what lovely things I have. The retired men looking for tools usually leave disappointed although thanks to Bill there were a few Guy Things this time around. Young couples come in trying to appear above it all and sometimes they succeed.

There is another kind of couple that shows up. The most polite way to describe them is Retro. On Sunday one such couple appeared to have wandered in from the set of Perry Mason.

“Oh Albie, buy these for me. I have to have them. They’re only $8!” She picked up one of five differently fashioned and colored aperitif glasses blooming on a tray.

Albie who was ready reeking of whiskey at 11:00 in the morning growled, “They aren’t worth $8,” earning him my undying disgust.

“Then buy me this. I want this.” She pounced on something else but I was keeping an eye on my aperitif glasses so I don’t know what it was.

“We’re supposed to be on a budget and now you’re wanting all this stuff,” Albie grunted.

“Oh have we started the budget?”

Nancy had come with coffee and was wandering around the sun room when a young man came through the door. He was black and spoke with an accent. I asked where he was from.

“Viet Nam,” he told me.

I was thrown into white, middle-class confusion. He was black. He couldn’t be from Viet Nam.

“You must know a lot of languages,” I said.

“Yeah, two.”

“Oh, English and. . ?”

“Yeah, Vietnamese.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nancy trying not to laugh at me.

The young man was full of energy. He bought the bottle of Richard’s Wild Irish Rose wine that I had been trying to get rid of for years. I had attached a little disclaimer to say that the label was vintage but I could not vouch for the liquid inside. I couldn’t vouch for anything about it except that my mother had hidden it in her closet while it was still two thirds full so no one would know her lips had touched liquor. That could have been any time since the 70s. Kay took a swig of it last year and hadn’t died from it.

The Black Vietnamese man bought a lot of dishes and plates. He bought five cups. He bought my bong that looked like Merlin, the extra filters and a pack of Zig-zag cigarette papers. He bought a suitcase that I would have paid him to take away since it was too big to be a carry-on and it would take all my yard sale earnings to check a bag that size these days. My new favorite customer said he goes back to Vietnam every year and likes to take gifts to everyone.

Nancy held it in admirably until he left, then she laughed that thank god I had finally calmed down about where the man was from. Nancy herself was born in Lebanon, lived in the UAE, and went to school in India and Pakistan. In addition she teaches at a community college. CC campuses are hot beds of multi-culturalism, trigger warnings and political correctness these days. She was very nice about explaining the obvious to me: the man’s father could have been an African American G-I. Nancy fields a dozen faux pas like mine every day before second period.

Clearly I don’t get out enough. I’ve been living in a world of Wild Irish Rose wine, Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia and the cast from Perry Mason. See you next year at my Second Annual Farewell Yard Sale.

The Vercors Massif in southeast France rises half a mile high, creating a natural fortress, crisscrossed with forests, farmland, ravines, caves, and secret paths. There are eight gateway roads but only one that’s easily accessible. In 1942 the Vercors was a gathering place for the Maquis.

The Maquis was born when the Allies began their North African campaign, which prompted the Germans to broaden their occupation to all of France. When the Germans began conscripting young French men to work in factories in Germany, it caused an exodus of men to the hills and forests. The largest concentration of these guerilla fighters was in the Vercors Massif.

Someone had the heady idea of creating a free French republic on the Vercors right there in the middle of occupied France. They hoisted a French flag where it could be seen by and could irritate the German garrison in Grenoble.  Men—and women– had outlooks above all the approaches and could pick off the Germans if they tried to enter the plateau. The maquisards crept into towns in the area, stole equipment, firearms and vehicles and blew up train tracks and bridges, and then disappeared back onto the Vercors. For a while this worked beautifully but in the long run, this use of the Vercors as a permanent home for the Maquis was naïveté looking for a tragedy.

While this was the situation on the ground, back at HQ there was internecine fighting amongst the De Gaullists, S.O.E, and MI6. London had no control over the Maquis, many who were communists with their added agenda, but S.O.E. had to contend with everything: the out of touch bureaucracy in London, the testosterone of the very angry French, the Communists, and the American OSS, which wouldn’t play with either the Communists or De Gaulle. Subterranean politics over who would control France after the war was responsible for a lot of what we cynically refer to as “Casualties of War.”

In any case, in the run-up to D-Day, S.O.E. had the job of creating an illusion that there would be landings on both the north and south coasts of France simultaneously in order to keep part of the German army on alert in the south. Then when the landings began on the Normandy beaches, sabotage all over the country would prevent troops from moving north. All of this did happen to some extent. Eisenhower calculated that S.O.E. shaved six months off the length of the war by these methods.

The Vercors was part of this diversionary activity with devastating results. Close to D-Day, Maquis leaders on Vercors got an order from S.O.E. southern headquarters in Algiers to mobilize and start an uprising to divert German attention. All over the area men left their families and joined the Maquis for this final push. The Vercors was in Francis Cammaerts’ Jockey network and he was a regular visitor to the plateau. When he got wind of the situation, he pointed out that the Vercors didn’t take orders from Algiers, but from London. When the cock-up got straightened out, London naïvely ordered the men to go home where they would have all been rounded up by the Germans and shot.

Now the Free Republic was a prison of a ragtag bunch of men and boys with limited means of defending themselves and little training. Their only advantage was their knowledge of the terrain. Wire after wire went out requesting supplies and back-up and for the nearest airfield to be bombed because the Luftwaffe was massing there. On July 14, Bastille Day, there was finally a huge parachute drop of supplies onto the Vercors. Unfortunately it came in daylight, also visible to the Germans. As the French tried to collect the hundreds of canisters, the Germans launched their attack on the Vercors. Tanks roared up the passes and the Luftwaffe attacked by air. Towns were razed and people were killed with grotesque sadism.  A hospital that had moved from a town to a cave was massacred, patients and staff.

Christine Granville had been parachuted into this mess as Francis’ new courier. During the Bastille Day drop and subsequent German attack, she reportedly spent days searching out, unpacking and distributing every canister she could find. Danger really got her going.

Christine and Francis immediately took to one another. Both had initiative, energy and charm. When the Germans attacked the Vercors, initiative, energy and charm didn’t go very far. Christine and Francis were part of a small party that was able to escape.  Christine moved on to charm a group of Polish POWs near the Italian border who had been conned into working for Germany into changing sides again.  While she was at this task, Francis was captured with two of his men and jailed in the town of Digne.

Here is Christine at her most audacious: She marched into Gestapo headquarters in Digne, bluffed a man called Waem.  She told him she was  Field Marshall Montgomery’s niece and a British spy.  She wanted the three English prisoners released in exchange for safe passage for himself out of France.  By now the Americans had landed on the south coast and were heading inland so this was a shrewd inticement.

On the morning that Francis and his two companions were to be shot, they were marched out of their cell by Waem. But instead of turning them toward the soccer field that was used as a place of execution, he herded them into a car.  Past a patrol point and around a corner, there was Christine waiting by the side of the road.  She got into the car and they drove to safety.

Francis lived to be 90 years old.  He worked for Unesco, and created an international system for the exchange of schoolchildren in western Europe.  He was a professor of education at Nairobi University in Kenya, then head of Rolle College at Exeter.  He and his wife Nan retired to France where he lived among former members of his circuit until his death.

Christine did not do so well.  She belonged to the war, and to danger and adventure.  The British government dismissed her as “no longer needed” after the war.  This happened to many of the S.O.E. agents; maybe because so much has been written about her that it seems particularly malicious in her case.  She was not given military honors by the British although she was by the French and Polish.  Official intervention on her behalf could not get her British citizenship.  She ended up working as a stewardess on a cruise ship.

On one of her voyages, she became acquainted with an unstable young man–George Muldowney– who began to stalk her.  One night –the night before she was to leave England to meet with a former lover on the continent and with high hopes for the relationship, Muldowney stabbed her to death in the lobby of her hotel.  She was 44 years old.

Every bio of Francis and Christine and every overview of S.O.E. tells the Vercors Story and the audacious escape at Digne.  Xan Fielding, one of the two men captured with Francis, writes about their capture at Digne in Hide and Seek, a book he dedicated to Christine.

One book that is devoted entirely to the story of the Vercors is Tears of Glory by Michael Pearson.

Combe Laval Road

cemetery at Vassieux

One horrible WWII photo

Lassieux cave, which housed the hospital

Vassieux en Vercors

The life expectancy of a WW II spy was not long, but Christine Granville flashed across the sky with particular brightness. Of the two books I read about her, The Spy Who Loved by Claire Mulley was by far the better written and researched. Published in 2012, the author had access to previously classified documents.  Claire Mulley explicates her book title: Christine loved life, men, adventure, independence and Poland.

Christine, by Madeleine Masson was scrubbed clean under orders from a group of friends and admirers that banded together to protect Christine’s reputation after her death in 1952 . Masson was herself an agent in France and she had, briefly, met Christine.

Christine was born Krystyna Skarbek in 1908 in Warsaw, the daughter of a Catholic count and a wealthy Jewish woman. She grew up riding, skiing, hiking and being bored and mischievous at school, if setting a priest’s robes on fire in order to make mass go faster could be called mischievous. Later in her life she was described as being “a loner and a law unto herself” (Vera Atkins) and as having “an almost pathological tendency to take risks” (Owen O’Malley.) Today she probably would have been medicated.

It was for Poland that she began her career as a spy, and entirely of her own initiative. In Hungary after Hitler invaded Poland, she made contact with the seminal Polish resistance, which was trying to get British propaganda into Poland. All borders were closely guarded except for where the Tatra Mountains separated the two countries. The mountains were so treacherous that it seemed a waste of resources to patrol them. Jan Marusarz, a pre-war Olympic skiing star was doing courier work across the Tatras when Christine persuaded him to let her go with him. It was the worst winter in living memory but they made it across.

One document that Christine smuggled out of Poland was an early indication of Barbarossa, Hitler’s plan to invade Russia. This was the first inkling of Barbarossa to arrive on Churchill’s desk.

Christine had a magnetic personality. She had a magic touch with both people and animals. Once she was sniffed out by a German dog while hiding from a patrol. She put her arm around the dog and whispered to it. It lay down with her and wouldn’t go back to its handler. The dog became a mascot for that group of resisters.

At a patrol check, Christine was carrying a stack of propaganda material that would most certainly have gotten her shot. She flirted briefly with a German officer and then confessed that she had a parcel of black market tea that she didn’t want to be caught with. Could he take it through the patrol for her? The officer obliged and carried her contraband in his luggage, giving it to her on the other side.

Christine’s story is full of episodes like these, which I gather she thrived on. Me, I almost wet myself just writing about it.

It seems impossible to tell Christine’s story without bringing in Francis Cammaerts so here he comes. Of the books I read, A Pacifist at War by Roy Jenkins is disjointed by the use of long transcriptions from personal interviews with Cammaerts, but that is also its greatest value. They Came from the Sky by E.L. Cookridge is a good read. Cammaerts is one of three agents he profiles.

Francis was the son of a Belgian poet-laureate and an English Shakespearean actress. The family left Belgium at the start of World War I and Francis was born in 1916 in London. He began World War II as a pacifist, but when his brother Pieter was shot down and killed, he changed his mind about fighting. Francis, however, was not military material:

“Once you’d accepted the notion of discipline of an armed force you were bound to accept the possibility of stupid and ridiculous orders which you’d have to obey. . . I had no intention of getting into any branch of combat except one where if somebody gave me a silly order, I could write back and say ‘don’t be a bloody fool.’”

Francis was exactly what S.O.E. was looking for. He established the Jockey circuit in southeast France, overseeing a large area from Lyon in the north to the Mediterranean in the south and from the Rhône river to the maritime alps. A circuit was made up of cells of 10-15 people that were insulated from other cells. No one knew how to get a hold of Francis–who never spent more than three nights in any one place–but Francis knew how to contact anyone in his circuit.

Still only in his twenties, Francis was tall with huge feet. Liked and respected by the resistance, they called him “le Diablo Anglais” or sometimes “Grands Pieds.” He traversed his area over and over, dealing patiently with problems and situations as they came up.

Francis worked most closely with a wireless operator and a courier. One of the main activities of the S.O.E. agents were to locate suitable places for drops: the parachuting in of other agents and of canisters packed with weapons, ammunition, grenades, materials for making bombs, clothing, cigarettes, tea, chocolate, and money. Having found a potato field or clearing, the wireless operator sent the location coordinates in a coded message to S.O.E. headquarters in London. Dates and times were arranged during full moon periods and RAF ‘special duty flights” did the drops.

The dispersal of arms and ammunition had to be arranged and people had to be trained to use the weapons. Then there was the actual blowing up of things: trains, bridges, the Peugeot factory. The arrangements were clandestine and dangerous. Francis insisted that each person work out a “legitimate” reason for any resistance activity in case of being stopped by a patrol or worse, taken into custody. There were no written messages. It was a dangerous world. You could be arrested and interrogated if you happened to look right –as the British do–before crossing the street.

Besides sabotage, there was recruitment of new members, something that had to done delicately. There were agents coming and going that had to be briefed and for whom flights had to be arranged. Downed airmen had to be hidden and then gotten onto escape routes. The Germans patrolled the hospitals so finding doctors was tricky. All in a day’s work.

One of the most exciting and sad stories of resistance lore is that of the Vercors. A huge plateau rising up west of Grenoble, it was part of Francis’ territory. They met when Christine was parachuted in as his new courier. That’s my next story.

Christine Granville

Francis Cammaerts

Thus summer’s reading project is a continuation of what began nearly a year ago and continues without an end in sight: World War II. It began with the S.O.E. spies, broadened into the French Resistance and slopped over into the Nazis until I was reading pretty much anything about World War II except the actual military history. Here’s what I think about war: it’s stupid. It’s a bunch of arrested grade school children who don’t care they are destroying the earth and the people on it so long as one person wins and *national security* isn’t breeched. So reading about military strategy has never interested me. It’s appalling the glamour that exists around the military when their raison d’être is to kill other human beings.

Having said that, when something as ugly and deadly as fascism threatens what we think of as freedom, there is something poignant and compelling about the courage of people who would rather die fighting than let such brutal dominance move in on them. As soon as I say that I think of Magda Goebbels who poisoned her six children before her husband shot her and himself. I can understand the two adults preferring some control over their imminent deaths but Magda’s reasoning about her children was that they were better off dead than growing up in a world without National Socialism, that is to say Nazism.

Here is the place for a feminist rant but I’ll forgo that because I really want to do a bunch of book reports.

Of all my reading about World War II, my favorite is still Leo Marks’ Between Silk and Cyanide because it was so entertaining and so well written. Then Résistance by Agnés Humbert and Until the Final Hour (also called Hitler’s Last Secretary) by Traudl Jung because I admired both women and because they gave, respectively, a French and German perspective, something I was not used to.

Before I start gushing about the spies, I want to gather my thoughts about why there was a resistance in France in the first place. I noticed that reviews of Matthew Cobb’s The Resistance complained that it was more technical than most readers wanted. I was so well dug into my subject by then that I was gulping down details that would have been overwhelming six months’ earlier. But I liked his simple definition of the Resistance starting with “ordinary people who were angry, humiliated or ashamed. . . who decided to change things.”

In case you aren’t sure what these ordinary French people were angry about, here was the situation: The Nazis had invaded, conquered and occupied France in a matter of about six weeks, fast enough to make everyone’s head spin. The swastika was hanging off the Eiffel Tower. The Germans had requisitioned all motorized vehicles, heating oil, fire arms and most of the food. They had billeted themselves in private homes sometimes allowing the owners to remain, sometimes turning them out. The French were expected to finance the occupiers stay in their country.

France was divided into two zones. The northern half and the west coast including Paris and Bordeaux, was the Occupied Zone administered by the Nazis. In the southern portion of Vichy France –headquartered in the town of Vichy– French officials carried out the administration of Nazi regulations quite willingly. Marshal Henri Pétain, a hero of World War I, was in his 80s when he took over as The Savior of France. A conservative Catholic, he apparently thought that lax moral standards had invited the Nazi invasion. My mother would have loved him–as did many in France.

Not all. While Henri We Have Sinned Pétain was collaborating (his term), less grandiose people built up a resistance. Matthew Cobb writes that the Resistance only numbered about 500,000 people, but other authors have suggested that everyone in France either collaborated or resisted in one way or another. Resistance could be small: pretending to not understand German when approached by a German, wearing the French colors, listening to the BBC (which was illegal as was the radio). It could be medium sized: producing leaflets and tracts and leaving them on subways, cutting telephone cables. It could be large: blowing up bridges, hiding Jewish people, setting up escape routes.

Matthew Cobb describes the structure of the “official” Resistance that tried to corral all the small cells and circuits that spontaneously arose after the Occupation settled in. Jean Moulin, Henri Frenay, Emmanuel d’Astier, among others all had leadership roles within the formal Resistance and all tried to receive De Gaulle’s blessing from where he sat in London saying, “Moi, Je suis La France.” The squabbling that went on between the organizers, the communist resistance, and the British secret intelligence and De Gaulle would be amusing if it wasn’t so exasperating.

Inside S.O.E. by E.L. Cookridge and Resistance by M.R.D. Foot, both of which I read twice, are overviews from a  British point of view. S.O.E. refers to Special Operations Executive, a secret operation ordered by Churchill to engage in ungentlemanly (and unwomanly) warfare. It was the Dirty Tricks division of military operations.

Here’s something you can do: find out what Churchill commissioned the S.O.E. to do. It’s three little words and every book jacket, book review, and YouTube documentary can’t manage to avoid repeating it. I am sick of hearing it so I’m not going to repeat it.

And now on to the spies.