We have left LA now. I couldn’t find any Gabrieleno/Tongva words on the net, and the few Serrano words I found are not quite appropriate. Maybe I’ll do better further on.
But we had a farewell party the other night. The first guy I met was a truck driver named Ben. We talked a bit about the hard economic times and so on, but we didn’t talk about it too much. I figured that if had, we would probably have gone on to the high gas prices which people raise here quite often, and drilling and so on. Ben said he'd been in Sydney for a week many years ago and loved it. I wondered why only a week; how old he might be.
Sal, who turned up next, hasn't been to Australia, even though he had had an opportunity to spend some time there after ‘Nam in 1969. I said, 'You're not old enough to have been in Vietnam, surely?' and he said, with one of those great New York accents: 'I like this guy.' Later, a woman called Eleanor turned up and he sang, 'Eleanor Rigby...' I said: 'Oh yes, you are,' and we laughed.
At mealtime I sat at a table outside with a bunch of people who became really, really vehement about the Tea Party and ‘the Republicans' etc... how the Supreme Court has just passed a couple of doozies and they sound pretty bad (including: a convicted person can't apply to have DNA testing of evidence once s/he's convicted - well, can you imagine the Pandora's Box??) but I wondered about how loud they were talking and the people next door and in the neighborhood and how these forthright opinions might be going down.
I got up to go to the kitchen and as I walked past the group sitting around the lounge suite inside, they were all leaning forward. Sal was talking – holding them intent - and I caught phrases like: 'had nine days left to serve' and 'they asked me to' and 'had to go out against this Gatling Gun up in the hills which had been going on continuously for a couple of days'. He mentioned guys he’d served with who’d died with only days left to serve.
When I went back outside, the other table were now saying how disgustingly the government treats veterans, not just the Gulf veterans, but the way the Vietnam veterans were treated, etc... I wondered if we should move inside.
Sal, who turned up next, hasn't been to Australia, even though he had had an opportunity to spend some time there after ‘Nam in 1969. I said, 'You're not old enough to have been in Vietnam, surely?' and he said, with one of those great New York accents: 'I like this guy.' Later, a woman called Eleanor turned up and he sang, 'Eleanor Rigby...' I said: 'Oh yes, you are,' and we laughed.
At mealtime I sat at a table outside with a bunch of people who became really, really vehement about the Tea Party and ‘the Republicans' etc... how the Supreme Court has just passed a couple of doozies and they sound pretty bad (including: a convicted person can't apply to have DNA testing of evidence once s/he's convicted - well, can you imagine the Pandora's Box??) but I wondered about how loud they were talking and the people next door and in the neighborhood and how these forthright opinions might be going down.
I got up to go to the kitchen and as I walked past the group sitting around the lounge suite inside, they were all leaning forward. Sal was talking – holding them intent - and I caught phrases like: 'had nine days left to serve' and 'they asked me to' and 'had to go out against this Gatling Gun up in the hills which had been going on continuously for a couple of days'. He mentioned guys he’d served with who’d died with only days left to serve.
When I went back outside, the other table were now saying how disgustingly the government treats veterans, not just the Gulf veterans, but the way the Vietnam veterans were treated, etc... I wondered if we should move inside.
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We were just now on the train travelling through seven states on the way to Chicago.
I looked out the window past Gallup and saw a sign farewelling travellers from a roadside stop. 'Ahéhee' (thank you) it said, in Navajo.
Woke up this morning to my first glimpse of Kansas. Somewhere in Missouri, I went and got a coffee.
The guy in the Snack Bar had a copy behind the counter of 1865 by Jay Winik who contends that the US was saved at the end of the Civil War by the leadership of four guys – Lincoln, Grant, Lee and Johnstone. I said to the snack-bar guy, “You had some great leaders then.” He said, “I know – thank God.’ In Illinois we stopped for a few moments at Galesburg, the site of one of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates. On the way into Chicago I noted the change in nature of Native American words – Somonauk, Sannouk. More consonants?
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