Category: Stories

These are stories: memoir, memory dump, what-happened-yesterday, tall tales, good lies, and pure fiction.

Old Photo Friday

In honor of the Football Soccer World Cup, I relive my own athletic glory days and present to you the terror of the 1978 Springfield, Virginia Spring Soccer League…

The Sabers

The Sabers. We were undefeated. We were the champeens.

I played soccer (spring, summer, fall, indoor, jv, you name it) every year from kindergarten up through my junior year of high school, but the Sabers was hands-down the best team I was ever on. In the fall, the team reformed with a few more players and became the Sabers II, but as with many other sequels did not fare as well.

So let’s hear it then: Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? THE SABERS! THE SABERS! YEAHHHHHHH!

By the way, that’s me to the left of the sign.

Monday Movie Roundup

June 5, 2006 • James Brush • 5 Comments

Do long movies count twice?

Munich (Steven Spielberg, 2005)

During the spring of 1994, I interviewed for admission to NYU’s graduate film school. The interview was conducted in a small windowless room where I sat across a long table from three professors. They asked questions about filmmaking, my experiences, my ideas and then they asked me to name my favorite director.

“Joel Coen,” I answered truthfully.

One woman rolled her eyes. The man in the middle gave a snarky half-smile and said, “How about someone who isn’t an NYU graduate?”

I had no idea that Coen went to NYU; he just happened to be my favorite director. Still, they assumed I was trying to flatter them.

The three awaited my answer, and I heard myself saying something to the effect of, “Uhhh…..duhhhhh…..ummm…” while my mind promptly emptied itself of the names of every director who’d ever exposed film. Flailing, I finally said, “Steven Spielberg.”

Which is of course the wrong name to give to a group of film school professors. I assume they thought either I was cuaght up in the Shindler’s List hype or that I was just some doofus who liked Raiders of the Lost Ark and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (both of which I do) but either way, I seemed pretty clear that they didn’t think I was NYU material.

The fact is, though, I really do like Spielberg’s films. There are many movies that in the hands of a less accomplished director would not be enjoyable, but Spielberg is a master of his craft, he knows how to lead an audience and sometimes, he really does make films that rise above summer blockbuster entertainment.

Munich is one such film. The film claims to be inspired by true events and so I take it for what it claims to be: historical fiction. It tells the tale of the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Massacre is which several Israeli athletes and coaches were kidnapped and murdered by a group of Palestinian terrorists. After this, a number of PLO agents throughout Europe started showing up dead, murdered by Israeli secret agents.

The film focuses on Avner, a low-level Mossad agent who is tasked with leading a team that will hunt down and kill the people responsible. The film works on two levels. It is first and most interestingly a meditation on the effects of violence on those who commit violent acts. Avner and his team begin their work filled with a spirit of vengeance and a desire for justice. Eventually, the humanity seems to drain away from them as they get deeper and deeper into a world of chaos, paranoia, and death in which they themselves become the terrorists they abhor.

Because this is a Spielberg film, it also works as a cold-war era cloak-and-dagger picture full of the kind of shadowy intrigue and sneaking around in Europe’s great cities that made cold-war era spy novels so thrilling. In Spielberg’s capable hands, Munich is both an action-adventure tale of international intrigue and an unsettling tale of what happens to those whose business is killing.

The film was criticized for excessively humanizing the Palestinian targets that Avner and his team dispatch, but Spielberg’s film carries little sympathy for the Palestinian cause or methods. It simply tells the story of what happens to individuals caught up in events bigger than themselves. Individuals who on both sides must sacrifice the ideals they claim to fight for in order to protect those ideals.

I wonder if Munich had come out when I was interviewing at NYU if I’d have gotten the brush-off the way I did. Still, I must have done better than I thought because I was accepted. Then I came to my senses and decided that paying student loans for the rest of my life wouldn’t be worth it. Instead, I paid in-state tuition to UT’s graduate film school and though Joel Coen never went there, I can say that I don’t owe them a dime.

And though Spielberg isn’t my favorite director, films such as Munich certainly move him up the list.

Old Photo Friday

June 2, 2006 • James Brush • 6 Comments

From 1979-1982 we were stationed at Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines. That was 3rd – 5th grade for me. It was always either hot and dry, or hot and rainy, so everyone’s favorite escape was Baguio City high in the mountains of Luzon. We usually stayed at Camp John Hay an old base that had been converted into a mountain resort.

Baguio 1981

I remember Baguio being a nice place where the air was relatively cool and the mountains were beautiful. Sometimes there was even frost on the ground.

This photo was taken in 1981 with my old Kodak 110 instamatic, which accounts for the bluriness. Looking back as an adult, I’m impressed with my composition considering I didn’t know about such things back then. It’s a wonder my thumb isn’t in this shot as it is in so many others.

Old Photo Friday

May 26, 2006 • James Brush • 1 Comment

One thing I like about National Geographic is the Flashback photo on the last page. It’s always something interesting from many years ago. Today, I hereby steal their idea and begin Old Photo Friday in which I will post an old photo from my collection.

This is from sometime in the late 1970s taken with a Kodak 110 Instamatic, my first camera. I was at a car show in Washington, DC where I saw Greased Lightning, the Batmobile, and several other famous cars. The icing on the cake was getting to meet Batman – the real Batman – Adam West.

Batman

You could meet either him or Robin (Burt Ward), but I joined the Batman line, got an autographed 8×10 (since lost) and shook the caped crusader’s hand.

This picture reminds me of a more innocent time in which Batman could get by with nothing more than a stylish set of pajamas unlike today where he must wear a bulletproof armored Batsuit.

“How Do You Make Up Your Stories?”

May 24, 2006 • James Brush • 2 Comments

We have a guest speaker program at school, and last week I was asked to be the guest speaker and give a talk about writing.

I wasn’t sure what to talk about at first, but then I decided that I’d talk about the process of writing and publishing my book, which is what people always want to know about when they find out I’ve written a book (by the way – shameless self-promotion here – feel free to click over to your favorite online bookseller and purchase a copy). That led me to thinking about answering some of the questions that my students frequently ask about writing. Such things as: “Where do characters come from?” and “How do you make up your stories?”

I decided to talk mostly about making up stories and thought it would be useful (and hopefully entertaining) to read a short story I’d written and then use that as a frame of reference for discussing how a story develops.

The story I chose to read is called “Yawgoog.” I wrote it during the summer of 2000, and it was published in The Sound Of What?, a now vanished online literary journal/community. “Yawgoog” is about two boys who find a bunch of money out in the woods near a Boy Scout camp.

My short stories sometimes originate in real life, little moments that emerge from memory, scenes vividly recalled years later. I sometimes tell my students to try starting their stories with the everyday moments that they all know from firsthand experience and then build the story around those things. The story doesn’t have to be true; it just has to feel that way.

That’s how “Yawgoog” started. While watching an electrical strom come in one day a few summers back, I remembered another summer day, long ago, when I was in Boy Scouts. I was at summer camp, out on the pond in a canoe, or maybe a row boat, just drifting and fishing with a friend named John. An electrical storm suddenly appeared and we had to head in fast. We couldn’t make it to the docks so we put in at the nearest land, which was away from the camp and waited out the storm. It didn’t last long and when it moved out, we went back to the camp. End of story.

The scene was vivid in my mind: two guys on a canoe outrunning a storm. Generally, when I think of scenes like this I write the scene as it appeared or felt at the time, but then I usually people them with invented characters. So I wrote the scene and got to know the characters in the canoe. The storm cames up, they paddle to shore and while waiting out the storm, one of them notices an old trash bag. I was as surprised as they were when a whole bunch of money fell out of that bag, but I ran with it, asking myself what these guys would do. That wondering about what they would do with it ultimately became the point of the story. Enjoy.

“Yawgoog”

The paddle cut easily through the water, and the canoe thrust forward a few feet, as silent as a shark. The sun was high, but the air already held the vague promise of coming fall. A gentle wind blew through the trees that surrounded the scout camp on the shore of the small pond. I set the paddle across the aluminum hull and stared out over the glassy surface of the water. Closer to the shore a small fleet of dinghies set sail as boys learned the art of running and tacking. Other than the sailboats, our canoe was the only other boat out. My friend Alexander, who was sitting in the front of the canoe, and I had lost interest in scouts years ago, but we went to camp and we fished and walked around the edges of the small pond while the younger and more eager boys attended to the business of earning merit badges.

The Universe in a Nutshell

May 16, 2006 • James Brush • 4 Comments

(Saturn image from Cassini (3-27-04) courtesy NASA, aquired from Wikipedia. Click image for a larger resolution)

When I was very young, living in Virginia, my dad woke me up in the middle of the night to go outside and look through the telescope. He had it pointing at Saturn, and for the first time, I saw the rings. This was back when the Voyager probes were sending images back from the gas giants, the days of Skylab and the Viking missions. Back then, it was easy to imagine that someday I would travel to the planets.

Those starry nights along with thrilling days spent at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum ignited one of the longest running passions of my life: astronomy.

Eventually, Skylab fell, the Moon got farther away, NASA went from exploring to transporting, the speed of light remained inviolable, and I gave up on thinking I would ever travel the stars. But I kept reading. I kept peering out through the telescope, every winter staring for hours on end at the Pleaides and the star nursery of Orion.

In college my love of observational astronomy developed into a fascination with the bizarre nature of theoretical and quantum physics that always led me back astronomical weirdness: neutron stars, quasars, magnetars, black holes, radio galaxies. Thinking about this stuff is to ponder the very nature of existence.

Endless fascination, of course, always brings me to books and so it was that I read Stephen Hawkings’s beautifully illustrated The Universe in a Nutshell. The book is a wide-ranging overview of Hawking’s thinking about the nature of the universe and indeed reality itself.

He covers general relativity and quantum mechanics before delving into the various attempts to reconcile the two, including: 11-dimesnional supergravity, branes, 10-dimensional membranes, superstrings, and m-theory. Black holes, imaginary time, time travel and the big bang come into play as well.

The all-encompassing M-theory seems the most fascinating and his lucid explanation of the possibility that we exist on a four dimensional brane is particularly compelling. In this scenario, three of the four fundamental forces (strong, weak, electromagnetic) propagate only on the brane while gravity propagates across the interdimensional space (or whatever you’d call it) to other branes. It’s an interesting attempt to unify gravity with the other forces, and one that I’ll definitely have to read more about.

Other than relativity and quantum mechanics, this was all new to me and somewhat difficult to absorb while reading in bed at night. Hawking, however, knows his audience for this book is not one of professional scientists, but rather curious laymen, and his authorial demeanor is that of a kindly guide leading a tour through the most amazing museum, a museum that in fact encompasses everything.

I love reading books like this because they open my mind to ideas that are as exciting and awe-inspiring as when I was a little kid looking into the telescope and seeing Saturn’s rings for the first time.

Oh, Just Burn Me at the Stake

May 4, 2006 • James Brush • 2 Comments

When I used to coach debate I often had interesting conversations and (of course) debates with my students. One young man was a self-described Christian conservative who loved to debate politics with me. It was lots of fun and he hadn’t yet developed the tendency to shut out the ideas of those with whom he disagreed as so many do who are adamant in their beliefs.

One day he asked me why I was a liberal (I’m actually more of a left-leaning moderate, but I didn’t get into that since the reasons are the same). It wasn’t sarcastic or mean-spirited; he was just curious. I told him that there were three institutions in which I was raised that played such a role in developing my beliefs that they continue to inform my thinking today even though I’m not actively involved with any of them anymore.

The first was the US Navy. Growing up with the military overseas is to live in something of an ideal, almost utopian, society. There is full employment. Schools are well-funded and high performing. There is universal healthcare. People of all races, religions and ethnic backgrounds work together in an environment of (mostly) mutual respect.

Second was the church. I was raised Episcopalian, and I learned that it was wrong to disregard the needs of the poor and the suffering. I learned that wealth was not the most important thing in life and that it was obscene to pursue material gain at the expense of others. It was quite clear from an early age that the ideals of the Democratic party were less unchristian than the ideals of the Republican party.

Finally, the Boy Scouts of America. When I was involved it was about camping, hiking, boating, and learning to live in and appreciate nature. The Boy Scouts taught me that conservation and environmental protection are the absolute most important issues we face. When choosing between business and the environment, I learned that the environment has to come first.

So there it was. I watched his jaw hit the floor as I explained that I was liberal because of church, the military, and boy scouts. I’m sure this is all heresy.

Thinking About Seagulls

May 3, 2006 • James Brush • 14 Comments

Seagulls have always fascinated me. As a boy growing up on naval bases I used to enjoy watching them dive from great heights and skim across the surface of the water. I always thought of them as the ‘eagles of the sea,’ despite the fact that the sea eagle is an entirely different type of bird. I also conveniently ignored the fact that most seagulls are really scavengers that would prefer trailing garbage scows looking for moldy refuse rather than preying on the creatures of the deep.

Their flocks, which at distances appear to be great swarms of white insects, enthralled me and often, as a teenager living on the shores of Narragansett Bay, I would hike out to a small bird sanctuary and spend hours watching them argue with one another on the beach, chase one another through the air, and at times my gaze would fix upon one lonely gull flying high above the others majestically scanning the world below his steady wings as if he alone were the king of all he surveyed.

Gulls are interesting fliers. They can soar for long distances, gaining speed as they gently descend, or they may flap their long wings and execute cunning maneuvers with great skill and daring, wending their circuitous way among their kin. They are just as interesting in repose, however. They may bob up and down on the swelling waves for hours on end looking more like a duck than the great and mighty seagull.

Occasionally in fits of anthropomorphic fancy, I have decided that seagulls are sentient in much the same way as people. I’ve read that gulls have been known to live up to forty years and one day, as I sat on the railroad tracks on northern Aquidneck Island staring out at the gulls calling and chasing each other away from their food, I began to wonder what thoughts might come to a mind that spends hours on end, year after year, soaring over the desert of the sea.

The Old Jamestown Bridge

April 19, 2006 • James Brush • Leave a comment

I recently posted an old piece I had written about crossing the Newport Bridge, which spans the Narragansett Bay between Conanicut and Aquidneck Islands in Rhode Island, but I did not mention, except in passing, another bridge: the old Jamestown Bridge that once connected Conanicut with the mainland.

Perhaps it was fear that held me back.

Crossing the Jamestown Bridge was terrifying for me when I was a kid. I was small so perhaps the bridge really wasn’t as fearsome as I remember, but it was narrow and it was high and it was steep.

Mainly, though, it was loud.

I remember the sound of wheels rumbling over the steel grating while wind tore through the spans and shook the car, rattling teeth and nerves.

The noise resulted from the fact that the main span of the bridge was nothing more than open steel grating which meant that you could look down and see the blue of the bay directly beneath the tires. Add the bumpiness and the terrible noise to that vertiginous view and it felt like you’d be lucky to make it across alive.

This morning, I saw a picture in the Austin American-Statesman of a bridge exploding. At first glance it appeared to be festooned with flowers. I read the caption to see that it was none other than the old Jamestown Bridge, replaced by a more stable bridge in 1992 and since designated a navigational hazard by the Coast Guard, that was sent to the bottom of Narragansett Bay yesterday morning.

So long, old nemesis.

52

March 24, 2006 • James Brush • 2 Comments

Last week, while driving down North Lamar, I came to the light at Airport and rolled to a stop. In front of me, a well used Toyota (I think, but we’ll call it that nonetheless) vibrated in time to the thumping bass within.

As I sat there waiting for the light to change, mentally reviewing the long list of errands I had to run, I noticed that the back end of the Toyota was slowly rising. I’ve seen plenty of rides (though I had thought this was just a car rather than a ride) pimped out with hydraulics so this wasn’t anything special. Not yet.

Once the back end of the car had reached its summit, the trunk popped open. Now fascinated, I found myself gawking and wondering what could be trying to escape from that trunk. Garish red light bathed the interior and before I could ask myself why the trunk needed to be filled with red light – or any light for that matter – I noticed that a pair of neon tubes affixed to the inside of the lid were the source of that light.

The lid continued to rise until it was fully open at which point I could see that the tubes were not meant to illuminate, but rather to enlighten. It was a sign. Actually a number. 52.

I stared at it for some time trying to think of all the 52’s I could. Cards in a deck. Weeks in a year. After going two and out and still pondering it when I got home, I checked Wikipedia and found that 52 also represents the number of white keys on a piano, the atomic number of tellurium, and the international direct dial code for calling Mexico.

Whatever it was, the stoplight turned green, the trunk closed, the Toyota jacked back down, and we drove our separate ways with my life having been made just a bit more surreal. Perhaps the owner of the car was helping to keep Austin weird or maybe I was just the random victim of a drive-by numbering.