In Normandy: Bloody Omaha

Nick on Omaha Beach, Feb. 2014

            Everything went wrong on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.  For days, or perhaps months (unclear exactly what our guide said. Roel, pronounced “Rule,” is Dutch living in France and he could have learned English in Scotland, the way he expands his vowels, plus the winds was howling and we were all keeping our mouths tight to keep from swallowing too much sand), the allies had been bombing the coast of France to clear away all the mines and obstacles and guns and troops the Germans had deployed there anticipating just this attack. Or at least they thought they had been bombing the coast but because of cloud cover, they had been bombing inland, leaving the Nazi defenses and the medieval farms and villages in which they were hidden intact.

            34,250 Americans landed on the beach that day and the several days after. The clouds had lifted, enough for the first ashore to see they were walking, or floating, or sinking into a bloodbath. But the waves of men had to keep coming to make it ashore before the tide, which would cover up the mines and booby traps, spiders made of sharp steel that would rip tanks or boats to shreds right before the bombs on top blew those shreds, along with arms and legs and skulls and good luck charms and helmets and boots and blood, lots of blood, like confetti in a cold wind.

            Roel showed us a picture of a landing craft with men packed in like rush hour on the A train. One veteran told Roel that he stood for two days on a raft waiting for the tide to flow right. The only time he sat was when the slipped in the vomit covering the metal floor. When he finally got off, he jumped into the water over the opened-up back of a guy he had grown up with in Ohio.  Thousands died on or near that beach.

            Bloody Omaha, Roel kept saying, when he ran out of facts and pictures. Bloody Omaha.

            In Paris, everywhere we go, I feel like we are walking on the dead. The bodies of black plague victims topped by street-fighting revolutionaries, then kings and priests, and some more revolutionaries, plus all the perfectly normal casualties over thousands of years -- old age or murder, or getting mowed down by a taxi cab.  At home, in our big and young country, we spend far less time treading on spirits.  But even Paris didn’t prepare me for Bloody Omaha.

            The beach is so empty now, hard to see it as it was, even with Roel’s pictures, even with the images from Saving Private Ryan still floating around in my nightmares. The last of the veterans who survived D-Day are dying now, and all the space on Omaha Beach says to me that the ghosts of their comrades are leaving too, dying a second time on that damned beach, old men who never were.

            

My Cheap Reading Glasses go to Paris

The reading glasses are sitting on a rough table painted not too thoroughly in white. They are made of plastic, a cross between translucent turtle shell and tiger print of a type that Shaft might have chosen for his living room back in the 70’s. I imagine it backlit, so a brown-burnt-orange glow suffuses his beanbag chairs, shag rug, and black lacquer table.

These aren’t my favorite pair of glasses, and you can tell that I don’t wear them often because the ends of the arms don’t show bite marks. I don’t even like them as much as I like the glasses I am wearing to write this, their facade more of a stylized snakeskin.

I think both pairs came out of the same pack, a three-pack Nick picked up for me at the Rite-Aid in Staunton before we came to Paris.  The third from the set is sitting behind me, cheetah spots on a magenta background, also preferable. This is at least the fourth bunch of this brand Nick has brought me, their price stamped right into the black packaging. $2.99.

I used to have only a few pairs of reading glasses. I would go to this hippy store in the Boreum Hill section of Brooklyn every time I visited Viv, who is studying design across the borough in Bed-Stuy. The store is rainbow cheerful, scarves and crystals twirling on sparkly chains cheerful, but the owner is a pinched blonde who wears her tie-dye like prison orange and exudes uptight energy, as if she is pretty sure I am going to steal something, even though I am and look like a 52-year-old who knows my place. Despite her, I used to always buy glasses there. I don’t anymore now that I am flooded with the cheap drugstore ones.

Before them, I would ignore the laser glare of the shopkeeper who, I could tell, was watching to see I did not violate the posted warning to return glasses to their place, lest different intensities’ mingle. I would choose just one set (once green with white interior in a paisley pink and red case, another time rose and black swirls with fake diamonds on the outsides of either arm), and then these would become my special glasses that I did not lose. One set for the DC apartment, one for my good work purse, one for the office in Staunton.

But since the cheap drugstore glasses have come along, I have become more careless with the ones that mean something. I don’t think I have outright lost any of them, but they are mostly where they aren’t supposed to be. In the outside pocket of the small green roller bag I use for short trips, on top of the refrigerator at the cabin, under the bed. The cheap ones are more often at hand, which makes me dislike them even more, for being too eager.

The pair with the tiger skin sits on the white table with lenses pointed out to the cobble stone street below, and from its vantage point though not mine, the Abbesses métro stop, probably not the art nouveau entrance, one of only two in Paris, but certainly the lights on the enclosed carousel that sits next to it. Of course, even if the glasses did come with eyes to see that far, the correction, for reading things close, would make all the quaintness just a blur of stone buildings and the shadows they throw back at the rare afternoon sun.

That the glasses are blind to Paris’s charm doesn’t make me feel any less sorry I brought them.  The others deserved it more. They were already loaded with my memories of pretending to be the type of writer who works best in the bar of a boutique hotel in Brooklyn, looking up once in a while to contemplate ordering a drink made with bitters (I never do) or to watch the prison bus, its grilled windows and dented exterior painted the exact same white as my Paris table, pull into the garage of the courthouse holding area across the street. Imagine how well I could see, up close, if those same glasses also were part of pretending to be the type of writer who writes best in an apartment in Paris, working over the noise of the bells from Église Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre or the shouts of the barman across the street who cannot get along with deliverymen, his red face made absolutely devilish by the red neon light streaming off his awning.