mazal_

 I know I've posted this before, but, IMHO, it's worth running again. I may make it an annual tradition. I've revised the opening notes to be more informative.

Leviticus 19:28

      This is about the cult television show of more than a decade ago, “The Sentinel.” The title character, Police Detective James Ellison, has just rescued Blair Sandburg — his sometime work partner, housemate and best friend — from a serial killer. In the final scene, Sandburg, an anthropology graduate student, notes that in some societies, this would make Ellison his permanent “blessed protector” and so offers to have the police department logo tattooed on himself in gratitude. Ellison responds, “You get a tattoo and your blessed protector is going to kick your ass down seven flights of stairs to the lobby.”
     The original "assignment" was to explain Ellison’s over-the-top objection to a buddy’s wish to get a tattoo. This is Ellison’s interior monologue, referencing his father, William Ellison, a wealthy, emotionally distant man who raised him and his younger brother, Stephen, alone when their mother chose to leave the family; single fatherhood was an unusual arrangement for the timeframe (1960s and 1970s) and, for that and other reasons, I have always viewed William much more sympathetically than do most fans. This piece attempts to provide backstory with a backdrop of World War II.; I posit that William is about a decade older than canon states and, like my dad, is a WWII veteran.
     This story was originally written and posted just over two years ago in response to a Moonridge Zoo Sentinel Day auction challenge and is presented again as a Father’s Day piece dedicated to my father – without whom desertstarlight and I would now be in foreclosure, bankrupt and possibly homeless.

     So he eventually probably thought what folks usually think when they learn my position on the subject. That I’m against tats because I have the cliché “my body is a temple” fetish of the stereotypical bodybuilder. Or that I’m too damned conservative — Sandburg’s just a tad young to know the expression “square” — to realize that tattoos are hip, happening and now. Maybe he even thinks I hold with the Old Testament prohibition against marking one’s flesh. Those are reasonably good guesses all, I suppose. Except it’s not any of them.

     The night before I left for the Army after finishing my ROTC course, my father (I prefer to think of him as William, which gives me some needed emotional distance) and I got drunk together. First time, only time. And it was the first time, only time he ever told me anything about his own stint as a GI.

      He was one of the youngest to serve in World War II, that last good war, volunteered toward the end, lied about his age by two years to enlist, so he was way younger than I was at the same point in life. Probably that’s why what happened hit him so hard and why he never talked about it before or, to my knowledge, since. Not even to Grace — Mom — and for sure not to Stevie.

     Here in Major Crimes, I’ve seen some really rough scenes, lots of bodies. Hell, way before that, in Peru, in the jungle, I had to bury eight of my own men by myself, digging the graves one by one.

     But I’ve never seen anything like William did when he was still a boy.

     General Eisenhower himself had shoved the camera into his hands. Every man not assigned other duty had to take photographs. Document it all, the future president had ordered, so that, down the line, no one could ever claim that reports of atrocities were mere propaganda. They have, though, anyway, these past couple of decades, those damned Holocaust deniers.

     So William took pictures, all day, all throughout the concentration camp. Of the dead. The dying. The living skeletons. Men, women, children. And all of them, on their living, dying and dead forearms, had tattoos in blue. Just numbers, because, to the Nazis, they didn’t deserve names.

     William had drunk more than enough Scotch by that point in the conversation to be bleary-eyed and teary-eyed. Truth to tell, so had I. But I never forgot what he said then, his exact words.

     “Can’t stop you going in, Jimmy. Can’t tell you what to do about anything, you’re a man. And a man could do a lot worse than fight to defend his country, this way of life, democracy.

     “Gotta ask you one thing, though. Don’t ever get a tattoo. Don’t ever give one. Or ever let anyone you love get one. The tattoo, it’s the devil’s own mark of humiliation and victimhood.”

     It’s one of the few things he ever said that I’ve been glad to comply with all my life.

     I didn’t tell Blair. Much as I care about him — and it’s far more than he would guess, even after my comment — I probably never will. Some things are meant to stay between father and son. I can’t help wondering, now, though. What else about his early life has Dad never told me?

 Leviticus 19:28

     This is a short piece about the cult television show from a decade ago, “The Sentinel.” The title character, Police Detective Jim Ellison, has just rescued Blair Sandburg — his sometime work partner, housemate and best friend — from a serial killer. In the last scene, Sandburg, an anthropology graduate student, notes that in some societies, this would make Ellison his permanent “blessed protector” and so offers to have the police department logo tattooed on himself in gratitude. Ellison responds, “You get a tattoo and your blessed protector is going to kick your ass down seven flights of stairs to the lobby.” The original "challenge" was to explain Ellison’s over-the-top objection to a buddy’s wish to get a tattoo. This is Ellison’s interior monologue.

     I was taken aback that Sandburg would even josh about getting a tattoo. And he must have been surprised at my negative reaction to the idea. After all, I’m a veteran of law enforcement and, before that, the military. In both cases, tats are a big part of what Sandburg would surely think of as the deep-seated tribal culture.

     So he eventually probably thought what folks usually think when they learn my position on the subject. That I’m against tats because I have the cliché “my body is a temple” fetish of the stereotypical bodybuilder. Or that I’m too damned conservative — Sandburg’s just a tad young to know the expression “square” — to realize that tattoos are hip, happening and now. Maybe he even thinks I hold with the Old Testament prohibition against marking one’s flesh. Those are reasonably good guesses all, I suppose. Except it’s not any of them.

     The night before I left for the Army after finishing my ROTC course, my father (I prefer to think of him as William, which gives me some needed emotional distance) and I got drunk together. First time, only time. And it was the first time, only time he ever told me anything about his own stint as a GI.

      He was one of the youngest to serve in World War II, that last good war, volunteered toward the end, lied about his age by two years to enlist, so he was way younger than I was at the same point in life. Probably that’s why what happened hit him so hard and why he never talked about it before or, to my knowledge, since. Not even to Grace — Mom — and for sure not to Stevie.

     Here in Major Crimes, I’ve seen some really rough scenes, lots of bodies. Hell, way before that, in Peru, in the jungle, I had to bury eight of my own men by myself, digging the graves one by one.

     But I’ve never seen anything like William did when he was still a boy.

     General Eisenhower himself had shoved the camera into his hands. Every man not assigned other duty had to take photographs. Document it all, the future president had ordered, so that, down the line, no one could ever claim that reports of atrocities were mere propaganda. They have, though, anyway, these past couple of decades, those damned Holocaust deniers.

     So William took pictures, all day, all throughout the concentration camp. Of the dead. The dying. The living skeletons. Men, women, children. And all of them, on their living, dying and dead forearms, had tattoos in blue. Just numbers, because, to the Nazis, they didn’t deserve names.

     William had drunk more than enough Scotch by that point in the conversation to be bleary-eyed and teary-eyed. Truth to tell, so had I. But I never forgot what he said then, his exact words.

     “Can’t stop you going in, Jimmy. Can’t tell you what to do about anything, you’re a man. And a man could do a lot worse than fight to defend his country, this way of life, democracy.

     “Gotta ask you one thing, though. Don’t ever get a tattoo. Don’t ever give one. Or ever let anyone you love get one. The tattoo, it’s the devil’s own mark of humiliation and victimhood.”

     It’s one of the few things he ever said that I’ve been glad to comply with all my life.

     I didn’t tell Blair. Much as I care about him — and it’s far more than he would guess, even after my comment — I probably never will. Some things are meant to stay between father and son. I can’t help wondering, now, though. What else about his early life has Dad never told me?