Small Step

L-R Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin,
but from our (non-alternate) reality.

Prompt - Alternate Reality (500 words): Alternative realities might be drastically different, like George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), or subtle, like Franz Kafka’s Amerika (1927), where New York becomes unsettling because of its small differences; for example, the Statue of Liberty holds a sword rather than a torch. Write a flash piece set in an alternative reality, conveying as much about this new world in as few words as possible.

Note: This is a work of complete and utter fiction. I changed a single, though important, detail about an inspiring American, asking "what if?" and this story answers that question.

***

    “All those moon-landing conspiracists? They have no idea.” Nellie held her youngest grandson on her lap, and her granddaughters sat on either side of her.  They knew every word of the story, delighting in being included in the secret.  Her kids quietly worked on Thanksgiving dinner while listening to Nellie, as caught up as the youngsters.  

    “We really went to the moon.  But there WAS a big conspiracy.  The biggest one of all.”  

    Nellie’s younger granddaughter couldn’t contain herself, “Grandma Armstrong, your name isn’t really Neil. It’s Nellie!”  

    Nellie laughed. ”That’s right. My real name is Nell, and I used the name Neil when I applied to study aeronautical engineering at Purdue. I claimed they’d misspelled my name on my high school records. I figured if they thought I was a woman, they wouldn’t let me —”

    “And Uncle Dean was really the one who served in the Navy under your name?” Her oldest granddaughter interrupted. 

    “Yep. My brother Dean knew I wanted to be an astronaut.  He figured I had the brains to do it, and didn't think it mattered that I was a woman, and he made it his mission to get me there.”

    Nellie pushed her long white hair out of her face, and that reminded her of the next part of the story. “First, I cut off my hair; I had to argue with the barber - he refused at first. Then, I had to learn to walk, talk, and look like a man.  Showering in college wasn’t easy, let me tell you!  But I pulled it off.” Nellie didn’t tell her grandbabies that she’d occasionally used sex to bribe the men who found her out into keeping their mouths shut.

    “But then I got into the NASA program.  Lots of doctors were going to examine me.  I’d need some modifications to the space suits.”  Nellie also didn’t mention that she had been glad birth control pills could prevent menstruation while she was in space.  “Slowly, I told a few of them. Just enough to get what I needed.  It became an open secret, though. No one talked about it, probably because they were embarrassed I’d fooled them.”

    Her grandson piped in, “But Uncle Buzz and Uncle Michael knew!”

    She hugged him tight. “Yes, honey. They sure did. They thought it was the greatest prank in the world that the first man to walk on the moon was a woman. They even helped me pull it off.”

    “And they laughed, right? When you said ‘one small step,’” her oldest daughter, sporting a few white hairs of her own, called from across the room where she was stuffing the turkey.  

    Nellie smiled. One of her happiest moments had been when her daughter was able to apply to the NASA training program and be accepted without having to hide her sex.  “Oh, yes.  And when I stepped out of the LM and said, ‘That's one small step for man,’ they laughed and laughed— they loved the irony.  And I did, too.”

--May 25, 2020

AI's storytelling has improved, but it's still pretty weird.

Image source: UCLA Newsroom

     About 2.5 years ago, I tested to see how well ChatGPT would handle a writing assignment. I fed it a chapter from my book (the one that describes my mom's birth) and asked it to switch the point of view (POV) from one character to another. The results were ... weird.  AI included such rookie mistakes as head-hopping and including info that the other character couldn't have known, because they weren't in the same room.  If you are curious, scroll about halfway down this story to see the results.

    I decided to repeat the exercise, and it's definitely gotten better, even wildly better, but it still makes mistakes, in POV, in verb tense, and in logic. It also does a poor job of inventing details to fill in narrative gaps.

My rough draft of Arthur's POV:

    At the hospital, the doctor took Roma into an exam room. Arthur started to take off his coat, then realized the waiting room was so cold he could see his breath.  

    The doctor brought Roma back out.  “She’s not quite ready; perhaps another few hours.  The delivery room isn’t in use now, so you may wait with her there until it’s time.”  The doctor led them into the delivery room. “We are only heating the ORs and the delivery rooms due to the fuel shortages.”  That explained the freezing lobby.  

    Arthur pulled a book out of his pocket. It was a new copy of Madam Curie by Éve Curie. They had left their first copy behind in Brussels. “Shall I read to you? It might help pass the time.”  

    Roma smiled — she was between contractions — and said, “Yes, that would be wonderful.”

    He read to her for hours, pausing when the contractions came or when someone came to check on her. After one such pause, he asked her, “So, what are the names we picked out again?”  

    “Sylvie Jacqueline, or Jean after your commanding officer, Jean Georges,” she reminded him instantly. When Liliane was born, they had chosen a name with an English cognate and had done the same thing this time.  

    Finally, something seemed to change in Roma, and she said, “Arthur, I think it’s time.”  

    He went to find the doctor, but the man was already on his way in to check on Roma, so Arthur stepped into the hallway again, keeping his hands in his pockets and pacing to keep warm.   

    The doctor came out. “The baby is coming soon; please go to the waiting area.”

    “May I retrieve my coat?” Arthur asked, rubbing his cold hands together.

    “Yes, of course.” 

    Arthur collected his coat, hat, and gloves, then pulled them on as he headed for the lobby.

    Arthur was freezing. The waiting room was glacial, and if he sat down, he got chilled and soon began shivering.  So he would get back up, blow into his hands to warm them, and bounce and pace and run in place to warm up again, though his nose remained cold and his toes stubbornly numb. When he grew tired, he sat back down, only to start the freeze-thaw cycle again.  He refused to fetch warmer clothes because what if Roma had the baby while he was out? And he could not ask the hospital for a blanket. The patients needed the blankets far more than he did. 

    After two hours, the smiling doctor came to find him. “Mr. Lubinski, you have a lovely, healthy daughter, and your wife is just fine.”  

    Relief rushed through Arthur — his wife and baby were all right, and he smiled despite his discomfort.  “May I see her?” Arthur was shivering, and his teeth chattered as he spoke. Stepping into the heated delivery room sounded wonderful.

    “Yes. Come warm up, and see your new daughter.”  

For the AI re-write, I added some color-coding. Green text indicates a pretty good change in POV, gold text indicates a partial or incomplete conversion in POV, red text indicates a mistake, and [italics] indicate my commentary.

AI's rewrite from Roma's POV:

    At the hospital, the doctor led Roma into an exam room. She glanced back at Arthur, who started to take off his coat, then paused, noticing the air in the waiting room was so cold he could see his breath.

    The doctor examined her gently, then said, “You’re not quite ready; perhaps another few hours. The delivery room isn’t in use now, so you may wait there with your husband until it’s time.” She nodded, grateful for the warmth and privacy.

    As they [where is Arthur?] stepped into the delivery room, the doctor explained, “We are only heating the ORs and the delivery rooms due to the fuel shortages.” That explained the icy lobby she and Arthur had walked through earlier.

    Arthur [he just appeared?] pulled a book from his pocket — Madame Curie by Éve Curie, a fresh copy to replace the one they had left behind in Brussels [she doesn't really question or notice he had acquired a new copy of a book that was important to them].

    “Shall I read to you? It might help pass the time,” he offered.

    Roma, between contractions, smiled. “Yes, that would be wonderful.”

    The sound of his voice comforted her. He read for hours, pausing during contractions or when someone came to check on her. Between one such pause and the next, he looked up and asked, “So, what are the names we picked out again?”

    She didn’t need to think. “Sylvie Jacqueline, or Jean, after your commanding officer, Jean Georges.” When Liliane was born, they had picked a name with an English equivalent — they’d kept the same approach this time.

    Later, something shifted inside her. A deep tightening, sharper than before. She caught Arthur’s hand. “Arthur, I think it’s time.”

    He rose to find the doctor, but before he could leave, the doctor entered to check on her. Arthur stepped out to give them room [they were in the delivery room - plenty of room. Better word choice would have been privacy], rubbing his hands together against the cold [head hopping - if he's in the hall, she wouldn't have seen that].

    Roma focused on her breathing, the world narrowing to the rhythm of pain and rest. The doctor stayed close, calm and kind, assuring her everything was progressing well.

    Soon he stepped out. Roma didn’t hear the conversation, but she saw the nods and gestures through the slightly open door.

    Time stretched and contracted like her own body. She was vaguely aware of Arthur’s absence and hoped he was keeping warm somehow. The lobby had been bitterly cold.

    Finally, after hours of labor, the baby arrived. Roma heard the tiny cry and tears sprang to her eyes — their child was here. A daughter [POV is good, but the storytelling isn't - it pretty much skipped the birth].

    Some time later, the doctor returned [when did he leave?] with Arthur, his nose red and his coat bundled tightly around him.

    “Mr. Lubinski, you have a lovely, healthy daughter, and your wife is just fine,” the doctor had [When they were out of the room?] told him.

    Arthur’s face lit up the moment he saw her. He was shivering, his teeth chattering, but his eyes were warm with relief.

    “May I see her?” he’d [switched to past perfect tense?] asked, voice shaking.

    “Yes. Come warm up, and see your new daughter,” the doctor had [past perfect tense?] said, stepping aside [barricading the way?].

    Arthur came to Roma’s side, eyes full of wonder. She held their daughter in her arms and smiled. For a moment, she forgot all about the contractions, the cold [the delivery room was heated], the long hours — there was only this: warmth, family, and the fragile beginning of a new life.

    The AI-generated version has an odd lack of detail, which gives it a dreamy quality.  It did a decent, if imperfect, job converting the POV (way better than it did 2.5 years ago!), and it knew to leave out things that happened to Arthur when he was in the waiting room, but it still left major gaps in the narrative. It (mostly) doesn't seem to know that it needed to invent details.  In Arthur's POV, the lack of detail regarding the birth is natural - he wasn't in the room with her, so he wouldn't have been aware of what was happening during the childbirth process.

    It does make me wonder about authors who try to pass off AI-generated fiction as their own, which seems like a bad idea.  AI's writing, even with the improvements, isn't actually good, and certainly not poetic or emotional. 

    And when an author skips immersing themselves in the story themselves, and merely serves as an editor to a robot, their writing isn't going feel like it captures humanity. Rather, the characters are going to be robots wearing makeup, their human faces merely painted on.

1946: When four letters tell a bittersweet story of post-war life

    TLDR: Because I am nothing if not wordy, verbose, and even garrulous, you can totally skip my commentary and just read the translations of the four letters, which aren't long.  They are in  courier typeface, and the story will emerge, though with less historical and familial context.

An excerpt from the 4th letter in the original French

    When my grandfather demobilized in the fall of 1944, he went to work for an organization called the Vercors Reconstruction Service, where he held several roles: as a civil and structural engineer helping to rebuild and restore buildings damaged in the war (he focused on Valence), as the Valence-area liason to the Vand also as a personal assistant to his former commander, who was in charge of the FFI Social Services (a veterans association of sorts) for the area.

    It is due to this latter position that approximately 50 letters to, from, about, or involving my grandfather ended up in the Drôme Department archives.  These letters tell stories of tragedies, of the struggles to rebuild French life, of searching for jobs and finding food for demobilized maquisards, of court cases for murderers, and of building homes for orphaned children, all while life went on as it must. 

    It's something of a paradox - they were doing such mundane things, yet ... it was fascinating, and in a way, beautiful.  There is something about fighting in a war that turns strangers into family. The 4th Company of the 2nd Battalion of the Drôme FFI was no exception.  They may not have been in an airborne division like the famous American 101st, but they became a band of brothers* nonetheless.

    This particular batch of letters all surrounded a man named Lt. Bergougnoux, who was about to be demobilized, and needed a job.  Unlike most letters, which are only one half of a conversation, we have the responses, and they make a story all by themselves.  They also demonstrate why, when it's done well, the epistolary format can be so effective in literature.

    I love it when I come across things like this. It's like finding a diamond ring while building sandcastles on the beach.

    The first two letters were from my grandfather, one to his commanding officer that enclosed another letter that Dr. Planas could send on if he agreed with my my grandfather's suggestion (Grandpa had a habit of doing that - using that same method, he smuggled a letter out of Nazi-occupied Belgium to his brother-in-law in the USA after his first daughter was born in 1940).

January 15, 1946

Doctor PLANAS, Etoile-sur-Rhône

RE: Employment – BERGOUGNOUX.  

4th Company - AL/JD 3063

My Commander,

     Lieutenant BERGOUGNOUX is looking for work, as he will soon be demobilized. I see no possibility of using him in reconstruction, but his situation weighs heavily on my heart.

    I wonder whether he could be usefully employed at the children’s village of Dieulefit. Enclosed, you will find the letter I would like to send to ROUX on this matter. If you find my idea sound, please pass it on, and possibly add a note from yourself.

     Do you see any other ways to assist Lieutenant BERGOUGNOUX?

     Looking forward to your reply, please accept, my commander, my complete dedication.

Enclosure: 1 letter

 

    I had to look up what a children's village was - it was a cross between an orphanage and a foster home, a place for children who could not live at home to be raised in a home-like environment.  After the war, there were many orphaned children, and I assume they were establishing this children's village in response to that. The system is still in use today, but is more focused on at-risk youth.

    This letter reveals a few things about my grandfather. In January 1946, he was still primarily focused on reconstruction work. And despite working full-time and having a wife, a school-aged daughter and a newborn at home, he still made time to help a fellow maquisard find a job.  

    Here is the letter he enclosed, written on the same day:

January 15, 1946

Mr. ROUX, Director of the Children’s Village, Dieulefit

RE: Employment – BERGOUGNOUX  

4th Company - AL/JD 3064

Dear Friend,

     I was very pleased to learn of your appointment as head of the new children’s village in Dieulefit, and I sincerely congratulate you.

     I assume you know Lieutenant BERGOUGNOUX, the very kind and dedicated officer from the F.F.I. Social Services. He will soon be demobilized and is seeking employment. We all have a duty to assist him as much as possible, since his family situation (his wife’s illness) is difficult, and he risks being left without means.

     Lieutenant BERGOUGNOUX holds a degree in literature and has long been devoted to social work.  Couldn’t you consider employing him at the children’s village?

     Awaiting your reply, and thanking you in advance, please accept my dear friend, my best regards.

     In this congratulatory letter, we learn that Mr. Roux (who had been one of Dr. Planas's officers in the 4th company, so my grandfather would have known him well) had been promoted, or at least, given more responsibility. We learned more about Lt. Bergougnoux - he had a sick wife to support, but at the time of the letter, was still working for the FFI Social Services, nearly 18 months after their area had been liberated.  

    Perhaps he wanted to work closer to home due to his wife's illness? Many Drôme FFIs (including my grandfather) were demobilized in September of 1944, and perhaps enough of them had started new lives, that there was no longer enough work for Lt. Bergougnoux to do?  I doubt I'll ever know why, but the man needed a job.  He also had a degree in literature (as an English major, I understand the difficulty in finding jobs in our field), which meant he might have been qualified for the job.

    Dr. Planas must have sent the letter on to Léon Roux, because a few days later, Roux sent a reply:

 

Die, January 18

My dear Lubinsky,

     I have just received your letter outlining the very interesting case of Lt. Bergougnoux.

     I’ve taken careful note of it. You should have written to me three months earlier. Because for the past three months, all our staff have been designated and are aware of their commitment to the Children's Village.

     However, when the Village expands, we will need additional staff. If at that time he is still interested, I will consider him a priority.

     I believe you will have received my letter from yesterday.

     Please accept, my dear Lubinsky, my very cordial greetings.

LRoux

    This brief letter tells us a few things: Grandpa and Roux were in very regular communication, and alas, there was no job for poor Lt. Bergougnoux, at least not yet.   And finally, Léon Roux misspelled my grandfather's name; he spelled it Lubinsky (with a y), which is the Russian spelling, instead of ending it with an i, which is how my very Polish family spelled it.  That seems odd given that Roux was a schoolteacher.  That tells me that either my grandfather didn't bother to correct the misspelling, OR that Roux was a little sloppy, rushed, or both.

    Anyway, a couple of days later, Mr. Roux sent another letter, and compared to the slightly terse tone in his previous note, this one was downright chatty, and observed the social niceties:

Roux L., schoolteacher in Die 

to Mr. Lubinsky in Valence

 

My dear Lubinsky,

     Yesterday, I replied to you very quickly, but I wanted my response to reach you as soon as possible.

     As I told you, I have taken good note of your request regarding Lt. Bergougnoux, but we will only be able to satisfy it once the children's village is operating at full capacity and we increase our staff (which should be in about a year).

     On my end, I'm writing to ask you for a small favor which, I believe, falls under your responsibility. I am the person in charge of the school cooperatives in the department (these are small societies that teachers manage within their schools). 

     In Soyans, the teacher Mr. Seignobos, with great zeal, runs one of these cooperatives, which has bought a printing press and publishes a school newspaper, the well-regarded "Flowers of the Maquis." His school was severely affected during the fighting at Beaufort and Gigors (do you remember that?), and the poor fellow is struggling amidst many difficulties.

     Could the Vercors Aid and Reconstruction Association perhaps help him by asking what would be most useful to him? (The members of these cooperatives are the school children who benefit from all the advantages of the society.)

     For informational purposes, ask Seignobos for some issues of his "Flowers of the Maquis."

     My dear Lubinsky, best regards. My regards to Madame Lubinska (I've remembered the lesson, you see!). And little Sylvie, is she well, and wise?

In Die, Jan 20, 1946

LRoux

    I love this letter.  He reiterates that he'll help Lt. Bergougnoux when he can, but he also asks for a favor from my grandfather: to reach out to a teacher running a school newspaper, to see if there's anything specific the teacher needs.  That tells me that my grandfather handled not just large reconstruction tasks (repairing and restoring damaged buildings), but also smaller tasks, to determine if the damaged schools needed anything immediate to operate.

    I love the reference to the battle of Gigors/Beaufort, which he used as a personal reference they would both understand, which shows they were still a band of brothers.  For what it's worth, I have a firsthand account of my grandfather's experiences in that battle, and it was terrifying. 

    I love the name of the school newspaper, Flowers of the Maquis ("Fleurs du Maquis"), and I love the glimpse into the education system, and how they combined resource-sharing (in a world of post-war shortages) with school clubs.  

    I love the irony of Mr. Roux mentioning an off-stage lesson in Polish naming conventions, calling my grandmother Madame Lubinska, which is THE most proper and formal way to refer to her, while simultaneously misspelling my grandfather's name.  That tells me that Grandpa probably DID try to explain how to spell his name, and Mr. Roux, out of habit, continued spelling it wrong anyway.

    I didn't understand Polish naming conventions myself, so I had to look it up: in Polish, the -ski suffix (and -ska is simply the feminine version) roughly translates to "from," or "of," and was used with place names.  So Arthur Lubinski meant "Arthur from Lubin" (Lubin is a town in southwestern Poland, about 140 miles west of Dresden, Germany).  Using -ska seems to be considered archaic today, and I think it might have been a little old-fashioned, even back in 1946.

    And finally, I adore the reference to "little Sylvie, is she well and wise?" That's a reference to my grandfather's newborn daughter, and it shows that Roux was close enough to my grandfather to not only know he had a new baby at home, but also that he knew the baby's name.  

    The reference is especially dear to me for another reason:  Sylvie is my mother (though she goes by her middle name, Jackie).  She would have been about six weeks old at the time. 

* Stephen A. Ambrose wrote a book about the American 101st Airborne Division called Band of Brothers, (he took the title from Shakespeare's Henry V; the full quote is, "From this day to the ending of the World / we in it shall be remembered / we few, we happy few, / we band of brothers."

1991: The disappointment was thick in Grandpa's silence

Real life vs Alternate Reality
(Click to enlarge)

Back in 1988, when I was recording my grandfather's war stories, he said this:

     "Well so, coming back — I am talking in disorderly way because I didn’t prepare all this, so it will be a hell-of-a-time for you to put this in order."

    Yeah, no kidding, Grandpa Arthur.

    Because it's hard to capture tone of voice in writing, I'll just tell folks how I sound right now: rueful and a little worn-out. I'm not being rude (well, maybe I am, but only a little). I loved and respected my grandfather, but there is no denying that he sometimes had unreasonable expectations.

    Anyway, "hell-of-a-time" is right. I am nearly 4 years into this project, and it's still not done. Occasionally, I wonder if it will ever be done, and sometimes I get just so sick of it, but then I discover some new clue, and my interest flares back to life, burning as brightly as ever.

    I recorded Grandpa the summer after my freshman year in college, and on tape I asked maybe two or three questions while I was recording him, and God, I was so young and just so ... ignorant. Now I have a million questions and I could kick myself because those questions never even occurred to me at the time, and now they will remain forever unanswered because he died nearly three decades ago.

    Well, at least I was curious and motivated enough to ask for his stories in the first place, and I'm grateful for that experience, but the tapes would have been orders of magnitude better if I'd brought along an experienced oral historian.  But, back then, I didn't know such people existed, and who knows if Grandpa would have agreed to talk to one.

    I was always interested in the war, because I knew my grandparents had escaped the Nazis and survived, but beyond thumbing through the pictures in my dad's Time-Life WW2 books, and reading a couple of novels, (including one for kids*), I had no real understanding of WW2. Dad gave me a copy of Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was 13 or 14, but I never got past the first 20 pages.

    The tapes sat around until I was a senior, and my first inkling that I had a treasure in my possession occurred when I mentioned them to the professor teaching my Holocaust class (Dr. Penny Gold, now Professor Emeritus at Knox College) and I wondered if maybe I could use them in some manner for my final research project.

    Dr. Gold's eyes widened, and then she got really excited, revealing her inner Indiana Jones. She was a far better teacher and historian than that fictional archeologist, though - she wasn't just excited that this artifact had been unearthed, she was excited on my behalf.

    This was around the time the movement to gather oral histories from those who experienced WW2 personally, from the soldiers, the holocaust survivors, from those who were there first started to gain momentum. Three years later, Steven Spielberg founded the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Its charter was to videotape 50,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses.

    Dr. Gold suggested that I transcribe the tapes, and because she was far more aware of just how much work transcribing audio sources can be than I was, she offered to let me reduce the required length of my term paper from ... 15 or 20? pages down to 10.

    The paper itself ended up barely 10 pages, but with the transcription, the project ended up somewhere north of 40 pages. And yes, I got an A.

    Like my professor, my family was excited by my project. I sent it to my mom, and it ended up being a little earth-shaking for her, because Grandpa had told me many things he had never told his own kids. The war had been an extremely painful and dangerous time for my grandparents, and they mostly didn't talk about it. I asked her to send a copy to Grandpa, and she did that, but also sent one to my aunt, and just about anyone else who showed even the slightest interest. It was really clear that Mom was impressed, excited, and even proud of my work, and that felt pretty great.

    

    Unlike everyone else in the family, my grandfather was not excited.   

    I'd expected him to be pleased that I had transcribed the tapes of his stories, that I had even used them in scholarly research, and he was glad of it, I think. But mostly, he was ... disappointed.  

    He didn't like that his grammar wasn't perfect, that it—as is typical of oral sources— was full of sentence fragments, and was a little choppy. He didn't like that I hadn't rearranged his stories into chronological order or placed them in a historical context.   Grandpa even called me and asked that I please do two things: to clean up his grammar, and to put the stories in order. He even used a little guilt: I don't remember his exact words, but it was something like, "It would mean so much to me, if you did this one thing for me before I die."

    I said no, and the disappointment was thick in Grandpa's silence. I didn't feel guilty (not yet, anyway), and in a rare instance of self-confidence, I didn't let it bother me (much). He had no clue how much work I'd already put into it. The transcript alone took me 20 or 30 hours to complete (I'm sure I annoyed the other students in the computer lab, with my constant play-stop-rewind-play on my Walkman).   I also simply didn't have time.  I still had the final trimester of my final year of college to go, then I needed to find a job (a daunting task for someone with an English degree).  And, frankly, I was out of steam.

    I also disagreed with him. When transcribing oral history, you present what the subject really said, not what they wished they had said.  

    I figured I'd pick it back up again someday, but then Grandpa died in 1996, and I blinked and 25 years had gone by and I wanted to take part in NaNoWriMo (my daughter had completed two novels before she graduated from HS, and I wanted to keep up with her), and Grandpa's stories seemed like a natural fit.

    And now, all these years after Grandpa's phone call, I feel guilty that I didn't even try to fulfill what was kinda-sorta a dying wish.  Because I totally could have edited it the way he wanted, but in a separate document from the transcript (I haven't budged in my belief that a transcript should be the exact text of an audio source).  But the other part?  Putting it in order, and placing it in a historical context?  

    Oof.

    If I've learned anything in the almost 4 years since I picked up this project again, it's that there was no possible way I could have fulfilled his second request before he died, because I lacked both the necessary experience and, more importantly, the tools to do it quickly.  

    But by 2021, the state of the technology had caught up with my needs, I had decades more experience and knowledge, and I was able to complete that part of the project in less than three years.  I'm guessing that if I had started it in 1991 after that phone call with Grandpa, it would have taken at least 10 years to accomplish what I later did in three.

    I used the internet to research, to accurately identify the correct books to read, movies and TV shows to watch, even newspaper archives. A friend with university access even found information on medical knowledge from the 1940s.   Instead of stumbling upon the occasional useful historical photo, I found thousands of photos with just seconds of work.  The internet also allowed me to find and build friendships with historians all over the world. 

    Computers have progressed, too.  I can do keyword searches through entire books in seconds.   I can listen to books while I'm out walking, and bookmark important passages in audiobooks without even having to stop exercising. Hell, I can even dictate notes in my audiobooks now.  You couldn't do that back when we were using Books on Tape instead of Audible.

    Now, imagine doing all that with the shots-in-the-dark that are card catalogs and inter-library loan, and having to manually skim entire paper books (probably missing key information) for hints and clues, without the ability to do keyword searches using a computer? Or translating the French and Polish letters in Grandpa's immigration folder, with nothing more than a dictionary?  

    I'm beginning to think that my 10-year estimate was wildly optimistic, and I'd have been lucky to finish it in less than 15.  

    * Snow Treasure by Marie McSwigan, about a gold heist in Norway, pulled off by children on sleds, trying to protect the Norwegian treasury from the Nazis. It's a wonderful book.

1940s: Deciphering 80-year-old "immaculate and illegible" handwriting ...in French

     A couple of years ago, a historian friend in France went to the Drôme Department Archives, and photographed about 50 pages of correspondence that were by, about, to, or involving my grandfather. More than half of the pages were handwritten, so I went all ostrich-like for a couple of years, because reading 80-year-old cursive handwriting is hard work, but reading it in a foreign language is 10 times more difficult.

    Procrastinating had a silver lining, though - transcription tools have improved massively in the last two years, and I took advantage of AI to create the initial transcriptions. Then I did a stare and compare to ensure the transcript was correct (despite the improvements, AI does make mistakes, even with the best handwriting).  That worked well for four of the five correspondents (click to enlarge the samples):

The school teacher:

    No matter what country someone is from, a prerequisite for being a school teacher, is having excellent handwriting, and this guy's was among the best I've ever seen.  Seriously, his handwriting could be turned into a font - I'd call it Headmaster Cursive.

The police officer:

    His handwriting is actually pretty neat and easier to read (most of the time) than my grandfather's.  He also leaves a lot of white space between lines, which improves the accuracy of the AI transcription.  But, there is an unfortunate side effect of such neat writing - it exposes the fact that the guy made an unfortunate number of errors in capitalization, punctuation, and grammar. The pattern of errors the spell-checker flagged was completely different from everyone else - it wanted to correct practically every verb tense, for example, and he didn't bother with diacritical marks much.  This isn't to say he was a poor writer, exactly - his writing was clear and easy to understand, and it translated nicely.   

The farmer:

    This guy's writing was also reasonably neat, but very slanty with lots of flourishes. He was the oldest of the authors here; he was born in 1891; it may have been a generational style difference.  His writing also didn't seem to have many errors.

The engineer (my grandfather):

    Grandpa's handwriting is pretty average, neither particularly good nor bad. I'm used to it, so it's one of the easiest for me to read, even though it's actually the second messiest of the batch.  

The doctor (and commander)

The handwriting in black within the square stamp, and
the word, "Suisse" is actually my grandfather's. 

   At a glance, his penmanship doesn't seem so bad, but it is an unusually neat sample of his writing. It says (with clear words in blue, unclear words in brackets): 

"[lury/hevy] cher Lubinski,
Quel est actuellement l’organisme
chargé [ou/du] placement [on/des] enfants [eu/de]
[France/Frcine]?

    You may or may not be able to tell at a glance, but the doctor's handwriting is by far the worst.  Seriously, we all know the jokes about doctors' handwriting, but I wouldn't have expected it to be true across centuries (ok, only 80 years) and cultures.  Speaking of doctor jokes, here's one:

Hmmmm... leaning toward the 2nd one down,
but the 4th one is also a candidate.

 

    Here's a more typical sample of his writing:

    I got:

[recevori] [pecconuel/personnel] [le] [depau/dépôt/pefau] des [fancors/Français].

[fauell/Veuillez] [poscuilor/présenter] un [horuenp/bonjour] à  

Madame Lubinska et [?/aux]  

à [leor/tous] amical [forevelles/souvenir]

[signature]

    So yeah, immaculate and illegible is about right. 

My blood is not for the likes of Ixodes scapularis

I hates ticks. I hates them, I do.

I keep picking places to live that are the Grand Central Stations of Ticks. Hell, I even grew up in Missouri, which is no slouch when it comes to ticks (though it doesn't compete with New Jersey, and especially not with northern Minnesota).

One tick-borne illness 20 years ago is more than enough (Lyme Disease, but we caught it early, so no long-term effects), and I have a friend with another, though I don't know what it's called.  

Frankly, if I could push a button and incinerate all the ticks, I'd be sorely tempted.

Two days ago, I spent about 30 minutes pulling weeds. At bedtime, I remembered that I needed a tick check, and we found three of them attached to me - the tiny ones you can barely see.   We removed them (Lyme risk is low - they have to be on you for more than 24 hours before you are at risk for the disease, and these three had been on me for as much as 12 hours, but probably less) and went to bed.

But not to sleep. 

I got maybe 4 hours of sleep that night, because every little itch and tickle sent a jolt of adrenaline down my spine, and I'd feel around for the little blood sucker that I knew wasn't really there, but my imagination kept gleefully whispering in my ear, "What if?" 

By last night, I was so tired that I went to bed early and slept long and heavily, and now it's hard to shake the grogginess.

But I'm having my coffee, and I'm sitting here shielded from nearly head to toe in coveralls. Soon, I will put on my boots, hat, and mosquito netting, leaving only my hands exposed, because my blood will not be consumed by the likes of ticks.

In the spring of 2024,
protected from mosquitos and ticks.

1945: Arthur's Bicycles

French bicycle troops making their way to the front, 1939 
Source: The Atlantic

    I've been working through about 50 pages of correspondence that involve my grandfather.  The letters had been in his commanding officer's files, but are now located in the Drôme Department archives in France. These letters are a lot of fun to read; it's like a peek into their lives in the immediate aftermath of WW2.  

    Anyway, I discovered a bicycle in one of the letters:  

P.S.: When will you come and get the bicycle that ROUX abandoned? If we delay, someone might steal it one day.

--Arthur Lubinski to Louis Robin, 9 February 1945

    Louis Robin was a local butcher who served in the same maquis unit as my grandfather, and after demobilizing, Mr. Robin helped to coordinate some of the efforts of the maquis food cooperatives. It makes sense - as a butcher, he had easier access to food and distribution channels.  He also served in the same section of the same Maquis company as my grandfather, an "SHR" group that supported all the different platoons and groups within the unit.  Léon Roux was a school teacher who seemed to know everyone in the area and had been an officer in the same Maquis unit, someone else my grandfather would have known well.

    Grandpa Arthur must have reached out to Mr. Roux about the bike, because I found another mention in letter dated a few weeks later:

     As agreed, I sent the bicycle to Mr. DRAGON last Monday.

--Léon Roux to Arthur Lubinski, 21 March 1945

    I certainly don't know for sure that it's the same bicycle, but from context, it seems like might be: Léon Roux left a bike behind, and Grandpa started writing people to find out where it needed to be, and finally managed to get the issue resolved.

    It's been 80 years since these letters were written, and I doubt the bike still exists, but I can hope, right? If you are interested, here is a series of wonderful photos of the bicycles used during WW2. Did you know both sides had bicycle machine-gun troops? And that they had bicycle ambulances, and tandem bikes that accommodated up to five people?

    Bicycles played an important part throughout my grandfather's story - he didn't own a car until sometime after he moved to the US in 1947 though he learned to drive while he was still in Europe (the government of France provided him with a car to use while he worked on the reconstruction). But after the invasion of Belgium in 1940, enough infrastructure had been damaged in the attack that public transportation wasn't an option for a while, so he rode his bike 40 km to work (about 2 hours each direction).  

    I don't know for sure what happened to that bike - but I thought perhaps he might have given it to his brother Paul when my grandparents escaped to France.  About a year later, Paul got himself from Belgium to Scotland via Switzerland, France, Spain and Gibraltar, but I mostly don't know how he did it.  Since he too was escaping, I thought maybe he pedaled the backroads at night on his brother's bike, and so I was thrilled when I came across this photo at the article linked above:

Soldiers walk their bikes along a partly frozen lake
on an alpine pass in Switzerland in 1943.
Source: The Atlantic

    It proves that my guesswork regarding how Uncle Paul got himself across Europe wasn't completely implausible. It took him about 18 months to work his way from Belgium to the UK, but about half of it was spent in the Miranda de Ebro concentration camp in Spain.  Even excluding his incarceration, it took a long time, so I think he couldn't have just taken a train, because then the trip would have been measured in days, not months.  So, I think he must have made the journey on foot, on his bike, with the help of underground networks, or some combination of all three (which is how I depicted it in Paul's book).

    After Grandpa escaped to and settled in rural France, he got a job as a farmhand to ensure his family stayed fed. I wrote — and this next bit is completely made up — that he borrowed a bicycle from his landlord so that he could get around the neighborhood more easily.  After they immigrated to the US, Grandpa was forced to buy a car, but I think he must have been nostalgic for his time pedaling around Belgium, because at some point he acquired another bicycle. I recall seeing it in his garage in Tulsa, although I never actually saw him ride it.  

    Interestingly, my grandmother never learned how to ride, and one of my aunts either didn't learn, or had difficulty learning. I too had trouble mastering the bicycle, which makes me wonder if there was a genetic component - but I had a gross motor development delay that meant I was poor at alternating movements (pedaling a bike, or the crawl stroke in swimming) but good at mirror-image movements (breast stroke or jumping jacks). I outgrew it by eight or nine, when I finally learned to ride a bike.