(When I was hired at the World’s Biggest Direct Marketer in Port Washington, I couldn’t believe my good luck when the place was a stone’s throw from Manhasset Bay. I cannot swim a stroke and burn like baloney on a frying pan in the sun, but Bay Ridge’s proximity to the water was always a charm for me. The latter presided over the removal of my front four and the ensuing bridge and plate.
I’ve been going to the same office since 1964 and have been treated by only two dentists the entire time. I periodically visit for checkups and cleanings at my dentist’s office. My parents died in 19, various relatives who lived in Bay Ridge or Borough Park have died or scattered to the wind, and even many of my favorite dining spots like Zeke’s Roast Beef, the Tiffany Diner and even the Nathan’s on 7th Avenue and 86th Street have closed. Gradually my connections with the place have slipped away. On November 11, most Americans will go about their business dead to the memory of the day the guns were silenced in Europe and a new and terrifying epoch of conflict was born.Back in Bay Ridge again, eh? I can’t help it, I lived there for 35 years after my birth at Maimonides Hospital in Borough Park in 1957. The days of venerating the poppy as a symbol of remembrance are long past. Yet, for Americans today, it is the poppy fields of Aghanistan, not of Flanders, which are front of mind-fields that supply vast quantities of opium to the world, feed pervasive Afghan corruption and help finance the Taliban. The legacy of the Great War is still felt in contemporary conflicts (for example, in Iraq, which became the British mandate of Mesopotamia after World War I and the end of Ottoman rule). The Versailles Treaty redrew the map of Europe and the Middle East and helped sow the seeds of the Second World War. The cataclysmic conflict led to the collapse of four empires (German, Austria-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman) and weakened a fifth (British). Of course, for students of history, World War I is a momentous event which echoed down the 20th century. Although Veteran's Day is a holiday for federal workers, stock markets are open and most businesses do not give their employees the day off. the store will ask shoppers to observe a two minute moment of silence in honor of the war dead (as is the tradition in other nations). "Veterans Day Sale, 25% to 50% Off Storewide" shouted the Macy's full-page ad in The New York Times. Today, Veterans Day is an excuse for merchants to hawk their wares. Then, over time, Memorial Day, which had its origins in the American Civil War, became the main national holiday commemorating all our fallen soldiers. But many people were still of an age when World War I was a living memory (I remember my mother buying a poppy for me on a cold afternoon in downtown Chicago when I was child in the early '50s). After World War II, Armistice Day became Veterans Day to honor the dead from another tumultuous conflict. And, for a reason: poppies have not been sold on the streets in the United States for years. But not a poppy was to be seen at at a meeting I attended in Washington this week of people from government, business and academia. I was reminded of this vividly when I was at a meeting in Europe last weekend, and participants from Britain had poppies pinned to their lapels, 92 years after war's end. Yet, Flanders fields, the armistice that ended "the war to end all wars" and the Great War itself are largely forgotten in America today. People wore them for as much as week before Armistice Day itself. (McCrae, a Canadian doctor, commanded a field hospital until his death from pneumonia in January, 1918.) After the war, paper poppies were sold on street corners in Britain, France, Italy, and America to aid veterans. The flower became an icon of remembrance due, importantly, to John McCrae's In Flanders Fields which was written after the second battle of Ypres in 1915 and became one of the most famous poems of World War I. The symbol of martial sacrifice was the poppy, which after bombardments had torn up the earth, bloomed in red profusion in the no man's land between the trenches. In the nations allied against Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, November 11th-Armistice Day-became a national holiday to commemorate the war dead. Millions of soldiers died in the horrific combat of World War I, including 1.3 million French 1 million British 2 million German and 100,000 Americans. John McCrae, 1915 At eleven in the morning on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the guns on the Western Front fell silent, as an armistice between the allied powers and Germany took effect. In Flanders fields, the poppies blow We are the Dead.
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