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BIRTHDAYS ARE HUGE!

I take a month every year to celebrate my BirthDay and Name Day. My parents were Helen and George Barnett, my birthplace – CYPRUS – In Cyprus and many countries Name Days are celebrated with as much energy and enthusiasm as birthdays.  

As AMANDA, a new young friend put it, ‘BLOG1 was quite the history lesson’ And it will stay that way, as I will explain.

All the interesting and weird mythology that accompanies being born in a certain place or at a certain time and when the stars are in their magnificent changing dimensional perspective, these are the portals, the key words where we find the clues that lead us to personal understanding. The wealth of data that surrounds our birthdays is remarkable.

And it is so important to accumulate all the folk stories and legends that accompany one’s birthday because each one will donate a thought, an idea as to one’s character. If more time was spent contextualizing our origins and enjoying the gift of understanding from whence we came, we could abandon the chemically induced stupors that have somnambulated the patients of 20^th and 21^st century mental health doctors. Talking or writing therapy is better than pills. What a tragic story that is. How much pain and suffering was brought to bear upon folks who only wanted to understand their function and place on the earth.

This is all one thought, but hopefully like a well-cut gem, the facets will overwhelm our disbelief. If one thought resonates with you I will have done my job as a writer. To meet you where we share an experience, I offer you my story, on my birthday! 

Writing BLOG1 was a treat, I planned for my birthday and I started a few days later on BLOG2.

I have to agree with Amanda. I am letting you know in advance, that’s what I am all about. I acknowledge the great calm of context. 

Adventures are what Life is all about. The experience of adventures, unfurls the flag, casts off the ship and relieves us of our stress. We are called upon to write the chronicle of our survival, the pursuit of happiness and the astonishing speed of life. We glide and scrape through the confines of circumstance and the fulness of travel.

It is People who illuminate our stories. People are everything in our vision of life, places are substance and activities are the batteries that sponsor good health and fond memories.

I feel a great calm as the therapy of recall, solders our events to our decisions. Recall is always a matter of research and conjuring because writing is not only satisfying but writing frightens the nerve-endings as we relentlessly anticipate the end of the story.

Back to my birthday. In 1947, times were changing for Helen and George and their son Milt. Helen bought a house in Palo Alto, California and rejoiced that after 6 years of absence George, her Love was returned to her, he was alive and not missing in action any longer.  But he was a little beaten up. 

George left the US and worked in Saudi Arabia and then the Philippines. George had to leave the United States to find work to support a wife and young son, Milt. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, his ROTC status from high school threw him into a leadership role. The choices for George and his men were either being interned in a concentration camp outside Manilla or retreating to the jungle and fighting a guerilla action to ambush and exasperate the enemy.

George’s remarkable survival was facilitated by a year spent at the San Francisco Veterans’ hospital. During his recovery the Army medical staff expelled 56 parasites living in his intestines and were able to quell the ongoing bouts of malaria. Soon he was well enough to travel and to testify in Tokyo at the wartime trials which took place at that time.

Then he was called upon to visit the Deep South and speak on a recruitment tour.  George was horrified at the apartheid he witnessed in the Southern states of America. When asked if he would relocate to Washington DC and perform the duties of a General he gruffly refused. His response was “There is no place in peacetime for a full-standing army. We would be undertaking the duties of policing the world.”

George’s refusal to join the military in Washington irked the Brass and his GI Bill was held up by the State Department. Irritating though it was to George, one million veterans had applied for the GI Bill.  It is no wonder, that it took Washington a long time, several years to allocate the funds to enable the million plus volunteer army who, with our allies, won the war and now were applying to go to            college.

After witnessing the racial discrimination and the unjust white supremacist beliefs while he toured the South, George opted to return to work, in the Middle East. He found a job in Cyprus and in 1948, the Barnetts left for Europe, the eastern Mediterranean and his new job. They witnessed the beginning of the Marshall plan in Europe which was 17 billion dollars in aid, when that was a real amount of money to help rebuild Europe.

 At the same time, Palestine was partitioned between Arabs and Jews providing a homeland for the survivors of the pogrom that slew six million Jews, Eastern Europeans, homosexuals, gypsies and any other enemies of the Third Reich during WWII.

Burma and India became independent and all nationals of the British Empire were awarded the privilege of British passports so that education and understanding were another consequence of the second round of world wars that disgraced and decimated the World’s populations in the 20^th Century. You would think they had learned their lesson after the first world war in the two start-up decades of that century! But No, they went for it a second time in the second quarter of the century!

Princess Elizabeth of England married Phillip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh and in the United States, Truman was elected president.

But the Arts and Ideas flourished. With one voice, the intellectuals, writers and freedom fighters all said, ‘Never Again.’ This desire emphasized the importance of rejuvenating the League of Nations into the United Nations. The desire of the free-thinking was for peace, conversation and diplomacy. There was a need to lessen the impact of privilege amongst the bellicose populations of the world.

After electing Truman as president in the United States, Congress scuppered the ideas and advances set forth by the Trade Unions for American working men and women when the Taft Hartley Act was not passed.

Fighting wars, uses up human capital and wastes talent and the ability to invent and change the world. Shared prosperity and the right to live and enjoy life without the threat of food, housing and education, rule of law, being threatened all the time is most definitely the right of all participants in another devastating World War. The human Species had to learn to ignore and arrest greed and the lust for power that accelerates wrong-doing and stifles the creativity and initiative of the peacetime population to return to a calm and prosperous life-style. I am not describing Politics, I am describing the ideas that fuel our Creativity

One cannot reach for greater goals and achievement if populations are enslaved by the ideas of land acquisition and agreeing to fund kings and queens, corporations representing bullies and dictators whose aims are to enslave the talent of their countries to accomplish their ambitions. These entities have not yet learned to share. We have one planet and moving to another planet, is just another way to accept elitism.

In the late 1940s, The People’s Republic of China came into existence under Chairman Mao. Our ally from WW2 Chiang Kai Shek withdrew his claims to Chinese Government and escaped to Formosa.

In 1949, Henry Miller and TS Eliot witnessed William Faulkner receive a Nobel prize for Literature in the year I was born.  Writers proclaimed their opinions, the arts flourished, as the reception for peace sent a strong message to the world about planetary wars, ‘Never Again!’ 

The unleashing of the atom bomb finally ended the conflict because the only other resolution to the bellicose situation facing the allies and the Axis of Evil of our enemies, would be annihilation. Oh well, we trashed this planet; move on to the next. And so we set about planning to reach the moon and then outer space.

My birth was an accident. In those days the medical profession ruled that women could not get pregnant after forty years of age, but Helen my mother did. She waited three years for my father to return from Saudi Arabia and was due to sail to the Philippines with my brother to join George. They never got on that ship. Pearl Harbor changed all that. It was another three years before he returned from his work trip that propelled him around the world.

By the time my mother learned that Dad was coming home she was probably feeling quite romantic with no idea that she might have another child. I was born in September 1949 and I remember floating in and out of consciousness under the palm trees in our garden in Karavostassi. My mother brought me back to life twice from Infant Cot Death Syndrome. Having your life saved twice, put me in a position of gratitude and I had to prove I was worth it, to her and my father.

My father had no desire for another child. George was born in 1911, which meant he grew up during the Great Depression. In that time, children were more of a liability than a pleasure because you had to feed them. The Great Depression did not encourage any right-thinking human to want another mouth to feed. George had no interest in another child. Another child would derail his plan to spend a comfortable life in Cyprus with Helen, doing what he did best: reading History, using Math and researching for what was going on in the world of Engineering.

In 1950, after his first contract in Cyprus, my father’s money from the GI bill came through. When time came for the trip back to America to renew his contract with CMC, George packed up the family so that he could study and receive his degree in Mining Engineering. My brother Milt was seventeen years older than me. He finished High School in Beirut and to my father, he was a troublesome colt that needed to be contained and needed an education.  My dad earned his degree in Butte, Montana at Montana School of Mines. My brother did the same and attended college with my father and then was the sent off to perform his military service. 

But back to birthdays and reviewing the past!

The first time I saw television was visiting my Aunty Anne, my Mom’s favorite sister. Liberace was on television, and I watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. I was standing on the seat of a big arm chair in a satin quilted bathrobe, with blonde curls courtesy of a photo taken by my Aunty Anne. All the encounters with my father’s ‘Family’ were terrifying. I preferred the local folks, Greek and Turkish Cypriots, White Russians and the Lebanese on our beautiful island including the overseas staff, back in Cyprus. 

My mother was enchanted to be back in the States with her family safe and sound.  We went up to Canada in June 1953, to visit Aunty Anne who had no children. While we were there, my Mom wanted to spend time more time with her sister and it was arranged that I would go to the Calgary Stampede, a big cowboy Rodeo shindig with my father, my brother and my Uncle, aunty Anne’s husband. I had new dresses and red leather cowboy boots, and jackets and a western hat. It was a bizarre experience as I was not quite four years old and I had no problem managing 3 grown men. I learned the trick was not to talk. Let them talk and then improve on their decision by being pleasant and humble but charming and direct, if thwarted!

My father was not thrilled to be back in the States. George didn’t like a disagreeable politician called McCarthy who started the Communist witch hunts in the US during the early 1950s. Dad completed his degree in 3 years instead of 4 because he did not want to waste time, he wanted to return to Cyprus and start his peacetime career as a qualified mining engineer. 

By 1954, we were back in Cyprus and I was so happy. There was an apricot tree in the backyard. And I played under it during the outside time, which was early in the morning and then as the temperature rose my Mom would lure me inside to help her make Dad’s lunch. She set up a child’s-size card table in the kitchen and there I sat, with all my work books for reading and math and elementary science, animals and maps.

I read The Cyprus Mail and The Times from London to my father, when he got home in the evening. My mother used to smirk at the pleasure it gave my Dad, that I could read by the age of 4!   

Dad would read out loud for about 30 minutes after dinner. Kipling and Edgar Alan Poe and from The Catholic Church’s approved reading list, ‘The Adventures of Don Camillo’ and not from the approved list -Archy and Mehitabel (by Don Marquis) for light relief. I loved that time when Mom and I would listen to Dad read to us, and then it was off to bed. Prayers and Good Night.

Not everything in Cyprus was perfect. One of the kids on the hill where we lived tried to molest me in the woodshed at exactly the time my father was coming home from work. George caught the boy and chased me into the house and as I clung to the wire spring under the mattress, George swatted at me with a camel whip he had picked up in Egypt. He was unsuccessful in harming me and my mother arrived in time to mollify his rage. Helen reminded him that I was only 5. George was so angry, even though my mother was 5 foot 2 inches, she had no problem facing off a 6 foot one inch husband. Helen calmed his fury. I had to listen to a lecture by my father which included the instructions to fight until I dropped when attacked, ambushed or abused. I was taught to fight until I dropped dead or lost consciousness.

The consequences of this event meant I had to go to Mrs Sessions boarding school. The school smelt bad and I ended the horror after 3-4 weeks by standing out in the rain, undiscovered for half the night. I got bronchitis and my mother brought me home to Xeros.

But my mother was not done with dealing with the situation. Within months we were on a ship returning to the United States. We went to Boise, Idaho where Mom made good on her threat to my father that we would be in the States until after attending Catholic school for a year, I would take my First Holy Communion.

I could walk to school from our apartment at 1015 Hays Street. The landlady was a wonderful Gal called Eunice, this school smelt also! But this was peanut butter, cheap bread and waxed paper.  After contracting Chicken Pox and closely followed by the Measles, and learning that I had to wear glasses to see the blackboard and the teacher in these huge classrooms, I was done with the American school system. Fortunately for me, by the time I was seven years old we were back on a ship returning to my Dad and Cyprus. 

The Cypriots sought to free themselves from the British Commonwealth. Not all Cypriots of course, there were some royalty lovers and then, there were the true Freedom Fighters.  Not all Cypriots supported Enosis which would have brought Cyprus into a close relationship with Greece. Most Greek and Turkish Cypriots favored an independent Cyprus which was achieved in 1960 and Independence was declared.

In the 1920s, the Greek Orthodox Church did a deal with some archeologists and the American Mudd family to re-open the ancient Roman mines in Skouriotissa and Mavrovouni with a mill site and jetty for loading the copper ore in Xeros. Thus, Cyprus was sophisticated in their choice of allies between the British Empire and the American company investment which included a hospital, a technical school in Lefka and the 4 villages which were built with local housing and overseas staff housing to sustain and support the production of copper ore by the Cyprus Mining Corporation, the American outfit that dreamed it up and made it a reality.

There was a devastating cave-in at the Mavrovouni mine in 1956. Lives were lost in that underground ore recovery site. Then the British mobilized their off-duty war forces as a peace-keeping force in Cyprus in response to what the British called the Intercommunal troubles, The intercommunal troubles were actually the voices of the population shouting for freedom. The British troops were installed next to the Mill and jetty. CMC had a cool railway that bought the ore from Mavrovouni mine to the port in Xeros to load ore onto the ships that picked up the cargo and delivered it to the copper buying customers.  

And there you have it, birthdays by the bundle!

Join me for Blog3 which tells the story of a magical turn of events after my disappointment with learning institutions; the stars re-aligned. I was saved by my mother’s creativity.