An Address To The History Society At WGSB, Hertfordshire, UK

The address below was presented on July 14, 2023

An Address To The History Society At Watford Grammar School For Boys

 

Though many a historian relies on a timeline, the story of our lives is seldom told in a neat, linear fashion. Dates don’t tell our story as the often slowly cresting wave, or the rapid blur, or sometimes the tale “told by an idiot signifying nothing” that our lives can be. Our days offer their lessons if we allow them to – lessons that never stop coming. Conversely, we never cease making mistakes and adjustments. With this in mind, I ask you as young men to consider two things. Firstly, go out and see for yourself. Secondly, serve a cause greater than your own material interests.

Curiosity, perhaps a degree of boredom and naiveté led me early to adventures and a peripatetic existence. There’s no place like home if you know what home is. I still don’t. At times, I’ve been derided by friends who’ve labelled me, with a note of insult, a gypsy. Two of my heroes as a student were Jack London and Jack Kerouac, both of whom were gypsies of a sort, one influencing the other. My third boyhood hero, also named Jack, was my late father, an only son of vaudevillians who quit school to join the Air Force because he believed it a more effective and less selfish way to serve his family and nation. My father travelled widely as a serviceman. While growing up, I listened to stories time and again, of his adventures in Africa, and Greenland, among other places.

I think my father passed along the wanderer’s gene. Different cultures, languages and viewpoints have always appealed to the sojourner in me. It isn’t that I rejected the family or the nation I was born into, but rather that I was raised to be independent, to do things in my own way, to practice self-reliance in all pursuits. There’s nothing wrong with asking for assistance, but as my mother often told me, “God helps those who help themselves.”

I remember how ashamed I was made to feel, both by Mom and her oldest brother, my uncle Carmine Cerullo, a veteran of World War Two, when for a few months at the age of 31, I was between jobs, broke, in debt, and needed to move back in with my parents. This upset the calm of my parents’ empty nest, but I kept busy working two manual jobs seven days a week until I had enough money saved to move out and start my life over yet again. My parents were never prone to loaning their six children money. My father would often joke, asking, “Where is the word BANK written across my chest?”

Neither I nor my siblings saw cruelty in this. We started earning as soon as we reached the age of eleven or twelve, either by shovelling snow in the neighbourhood in winter, raking leaves in the fall, or delivering newspapers before going to school. This independence was expected. My mother worked full-time and as her oldest son it was expected that I would learn to cook, do laundry, sew clothes, and monitor a Chores List she would tape to the fridge each Sunday night. She taught me these skills, and she demanded I make certain each of my siblings accomplished their chores every week in order to keep our house, which was seldom quiet, a bit more orderly. My best loved chore was burning our rubbish in a steel barrel on the fringe of the woodlands behind our house.  

I recall during that time when it felt like everything I’d dreamed of was not going to materialize. I simply chose to look outside of what were familiar surroundings and ways of perceiving myself. There was no lightning flash or divine inspiration. It took me nearly ten hours, two per night after work, for five days, to complete my application form for the Peace Corps.

When I spoke to older individuals who’d served that organization, as well as the US Military, they told me to ask myself what I could bring to the experience, not what the experience could bring to me. It was a year before my application was processed. It was nearly two more years before I received a phone call from Washington, DC with an offer to serve in either Poland, Kazakhstan, Tunisia, or Moldova.

The Cold War era of fear and suspicion, and an ongoing race for more nuclear arms, was over at last. The Red Menace, as the USSR had been called, was no more. I just had to see it. Between the two newly independent republics, I chose Moldova over Kazakhstan because it was less remote, smaller, and closer to Western Europe. When our group arrived, the US Embassy in Chisinau was still being built, and the airport was one faded building with a cracked windswept tarmac the length of a football pitch. Ours was the only airplane in site. Moldova had no fuel, no currency, and had just ended a civil war with the Trans-Dniester region, its capitol Tiraspol, which is today still an autonomous Soviet republic that is not formally recognized by any Western powers.

I was trained in Chisinau in Romanian through an immersion method by native speakers. I lived in a village with a family, none of whom spoke English. I would often help with the chores each evening, and after my three months of village life and language lessons I began my service in a small industrial city, Balti, which was proudly Russian-speaking.

Angelica, the Russian tutor who one of my Moldovan colleagues introduced me to, assisted me and after a long courtship we eventually married in Balti, where we paid the State the princely sum of four Moldovan Lei, about 20 pence in the new currency, for our official marriage license. Our State wedding was held in January in a building called ZAGS, an acronym in Russian for “State Wedding House” on a day so cold that the ceremony was postponed three times due to a lack of heat and electricity in the city. I remember how difficult it was for me to find a necktie. I travelled nine hours by train to Bucharest, Romania, where I discovered one tie in a kiosk and paid a dollar American for it, much to the kiosk seller’s delight.

As a teacher, I may be too idealistic and under-prepared, and I may still be, but I still don’t regret any time I’ve spent exerting myself to assist others less fortunate and in need of tutelage and approbation. The rewards of teaching, and I suspect of parenting, are not monetary. To quote Thomas Paine from Common Sense, “Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.”

I wanted to serve the patron. The society. The greater good. I have come to believe that government can be every bit the punisher that Paine suggests. I saw this first-hand when I visited towns and villages and cities and saw the poverty that had been inflicted on well-intentioned Soviet people.

After my return from Moldova, I endured an unsteady period of asking myself why no one seemed to know or care about what was happening in other countries. I began to look inward and take comfort in private intellectual pursuits, with lots of reading in all disciplines through which I discovered that the more I know, the less I know, and the more I want to learn.

As for on the ground adventures, I recall in 1994 when I was thrown off a train at the border between Moldova and Ukraine, coming from St. Petersburg on my way to Chisinau. I was held at gunpoint at a rural check-point in the wee hours of a summer morning, dawn not yet lighting the horizon, and forced to stew without my passport (which had been taken from me) under the watchful eyes of two soldiers with Kalashnikovs in hand, raised, pointed at my head while their superior officer decided nonchalantly over his tea and game of Tetris what he was going to do with “the American.”  

I sat in that hot airless outpost building until late in the afternoon, at least ten hours, guarded all the while, unable to move, to urinate, to drink water, fearing I’d never see my passport, my home, and my loved ones again. Then, as if bored, that superior officer chucked my passport out the only window in that building, mocking me with laughter as he and his men watched me run after it.

I kept running, gasping, stumbling toward the blistering sunshine over an endless horizon of wheat fields, imagining all the while that I’d be shot in the back. I wasn’t. I would make it to Odessa where I slept on a piece of cardboard on the floor of the train station each night guarding the 30 dollars American in my pocket, which turned out to be just enough to pay for a transit visa I purchased from a bloated vodka-drinking officer at the airport. I’ve written about this experience, rendering it as a story titled Boss Visa, which was anthologized and is also in my book, Off To The Next Wherever.

Since she had been allowed to stay on the train, Angelica knew where I was and what had happened. She was heartbroken, her face full of tears as she assured me she’d contact proper authorities once she got to Chisinau. As if those authorities could have found me walking hour after hour along railroad tracks, following the sun, hoping I was headed for a village, Odessa, or the Black Sea.

Having survived that experience, I say to you: We are seldom as weak as our imagined limitations allow us to be. Purpose in this life comes to those who labour to serve a cause greater than themselves.

Curious? Go see for yourself, and find what the courage inside of you may or may not feel like.