Times Are Changing

                                                   TIMES ARE CHANGING

My Navy friend Marcelo and I had ample time to talk, logging 100,000 miles, crossing the Pacific 12 times as lowly seamen on a troop transport USS MITCHELL TAP 114. I sometime still call my military ID when asked for my social security number. The troops we transported that wore strange green berets, were let of in the Philippine Islands for some sort of training, we didn’t much understand back in 1961 and 62. He took me to his favorite bar in Yokohama, and when in Okinawa he treated me to pork fried rice and a sailors' paradise, Nomanue.

Marcelo made a great companion for a shy Stearns County boy, for he knew his way around the Pacific.

He would take me to St Judes hall, where Native Americans gathered to dance, and to his two sisters' apartments to eat and rest when we docked in our home port of San Francisco.

San Francisco was probably a good place to get to if you were a Tlingit, raised in Juneau, Alaska, in the 50s, where the signs on business said no dogs or Indians allowed.

Marcelo confided in me, while we were on those long ocean trips, that his mother would not allow him or his three sisters and two brothers to give up, even though 23 out of 25 of his first grade classmates in their Catholic grade school quit school by the 8^th grade.

At our annual breakfast together in Portland, my home, Marcelo joyfully announced to me that he was now the elder in his family, and that his nephews and nieces consulted with him regarding all major decisions in there lives.

While his sister Rita, a nationally famous Anthropologist, and his sister Renee, who has her art in the Smithsonian, looked at me, his sister Ramona, the Oakland A's baseball fan smiled and announced, “Only because we will not admit our age”.

Nevertheless, even though my friend Marcelo is elder by default, I told him I would brew the coffee and prepare the sandwiches if he wanted me to accompany him on the ocean voyage from Seattle to Juneau, if he decided to buy his new sport fishing boat on the mainland because, even though Marcelo may be elder by default, I KNOW THIS TLINGIT IS ONE VERY GOOD SEAMAN.

Postscript

Even though I often times complain that my stone sculpture is not much accepted in this land where totem poles and masks is the accepted high art form, I was shocked when Marcelo's two nieces told me several years ago, that they would never travel south of Eugene, Oregon, because they felt unsafe there, in still redneck country.