Author Archives: Peter Sanford Kahrmann

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About Peter Sanford Kahrmann

Writer, disability rights advocate, civil rights advocate.

Remembering Frank Pierce

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Frank Pierce died three years ago today. The kindness and compassion Frank showed me and the many he loved and cared about was genuine and loving and sincere beyond description. Those who knew him knew a man whose caring and commitment to others, brain injury survivors and their loved ones were what I witnessed the most, was matched by few and outdone by none. He touched the hearts of those who knew him, including mine.
Not long after Frank died I was talking with his wife, Jane. I told her how Frank would say, Love you, brother, to me, and I thought it wonderful that was an expression he used with people. “No,” Jane said, “That was just for you.” Like I said, Frank touched my heart. He touches it still.
Frank left this world, but not our hearts, two years ago today. Having said that, I am republishing a piece I wrote on December 9, 2008, one day after Frank died. I loved and love Frank very much.

– Peter

LOVE YOU BROTHER

Remember to say I love you to those you love. I don’t know what it is about those three often maligned and misused words, I love you, that makes them as special as they are, but I do believe that when they are meant, they should be said. Not only to the many who deserve to hear it, but by the many who deserve to say it.

My friend Frank died at 7:35 yesterday morning with the two he loved and who loved him the most by his side. Like many others, I loved Frank. And whenever I’d say, Love you Frank, he’d smile at me and say, Love you brother. And I knew he meant it. I can still hear his voice saying those words to me, Love you brother. He meant them too, all three of them.

The words I love you are remarkably hard for some of us to say. For still others, they are difficult to hear. Still others avoid the phrase because it is has been used as a tool for manipulation and, in some cases, cruel manipulation, in too many scenarios.

However, I think the only necessary guideline for saying it is honesty. Say it if you mean it. Your history, those who betrayed you, used the phrase to manipulate you in one way or another, denied your ever hearing the phrase, none of these people deserve so much control over you today that they stop you from saying it at all.

A woman I love very much said to me recently, “Peter, you love everybody.” Not true. Not by a long shot. Rest assured, there are people I don’t love and there I even people I dislike, some intensely. But what I do believe in is letting those you feel love for know it. While there is certainly such as thing as too much hate in the world, there is no such thing as too much love. However, there is such a thing as not enough love – and not enough expression of the love that is there.

The first game the Yankees played after Yankee captain Thurmon Munson’s tragic death in 1979 was in Yankee Stadium against the Baltimore Orioles. The Orioles catcher was Rick Dempsey, a former Yankee and back-up catcher for Munson. The Yankee manager was Billy Martin. Dempsey sent a note to Martin in the Yankee clubhouse before the game. In it he told Martin that he, like so many others, loved Thurman and he, like so many of us, did not always remember to tell people he loved that he loved them. And so, in this note, he told Martin that he loved him.

And so if you love people in your life, whether you love them as friends or more, tell them. Use the words I love you – all three of them. I would ask the few of you who might feel saying I love you is a wimpy thing to do why saying it is so hard for you to do? Were it an act of weakness, to say them, it ought to be easy, no?

Take care of yourselves in life. Love each other as best you can. And when you do, say so.

I am going to miss you terribly, Frank.

Love you brother.

Shape shifting…

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Shape shifting rhythmic pastimes and I’m on a roll again

Seen sunrises sunsets moving across darkened lines hopes rising

Breathing morning air smiling quietly a new day dawns again

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Shape shifting in the early hours and I’m slow stepped again

Felt the pulsing tones of up and down blood flowing

Quiet night drifts in and sweet sleep beckons again

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Shape shifting I’m with my street boys on the stoop talking again

Magic first love striding by my side glistens like sunlight gold

Climbed from bed early morning eyes set on writing again

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Shape shifting seasons come and seasons go then do it again

Yet a lifetime’s motion has a beginning and an end

And with all that’s come and gone I’d do it again

*

Without book

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It is one of the most uncomfortable unsettling experiences for me. That gap between books. I finish one and then, for some inexplicable reason,  finding another one to land in is a problem. It’s like trying on articles of clothing and nothing seems to fit.

I am happy to report that this does not happen to me as much as it used to. But when it does, oh my, the stress. When I am without book it’s almost as if I am being asked to get through the day without air to breathe. There are times when I understand why finding that next book is a problem. You get drawn into one author’s world and then find transitioning to the next author somewhat tricky For example, a few years ago I read almost everything by Charles Dickens. Anyone who loves to read will experience a gift from heaven if they read Dickens, which means, for American readers anyway, slowing down and taking your time with each sentence and then, if you do, his dazzling prescience, comprehension and understanding of life from all angles emerges and you understand why he is, without question, one of the greatest writers that has ever walked the earth. But when I finished my time with Dickens, I went through a rather uncomfortable period of who to read next.  Who on earth do you turn to after Dickens?!

One of my common reading patterns is to lock into writers who strikes my fancy and then read a lot of what they’ve written. Last year I gobbled up nearly everything John Dos Passos wrote. This year it was all the books written by Bernard Malamud and then books by a writer who is now one of my favorites and who seemed to understand life with the same kind of global prescience and comprehension as Dickens: J.G. Farrell. But, oh my, those periods of time between books. Nerve wracking. Like being adrift at sea without a compass.

For as long as I have memory I’ve loved books. Though when I was about eight or so, I found myself convinced that I was not, like my mother and father, a real reader. My father taught English literature at Columbia University and my mother had been one of his students after World War II.  My father had served in the Army and my mother had been in London during the war. Her first husband was a pilot in the RAF.  Needless to say, they loved to read.

And so at age eight I went to my father’s room. He was sitting at his desk marking papers. Behind him was a ceiling-to-floor bookshelf filled with books, to this day one of the most beautiful sights in the world  as far as I’m concerned.

“Daddy, I don’t think I’m a reader like you and Mommy.”

He sat back in his chair and gave me a gentle smile. “What makes you say that?”

I looked at the wall full of books. “Because every time I start reading one I can’t finish it.”

“What makes you think you have to finish it?”

I was completely taken off guard. Of course you were supposed to finish the book. Wasn’t that some kind of rule? “Aren’t you supposed to finish’m?”

“No no. You’re thinking about school assignments. We’re talking about reading. Don’t you think the author has some responsibility to keep you interested?”

I had to admit, he made sense. “I guess so.”

“Okay then,” he looked at the books behind him and back at me. “Pick ten books that seem interesting to you. Forget page numbers. Read them until you don’t want to read them anymore. One day you’ll look up and realize you finished one.”

My father gave me the world of reading and the freedom to explore that world. Books have been my joy and refuge throughout my life. Through my days of homelessness (I would nick them off the paperback racks in drugstores)  I’d always have one stuffed in my back pocket. Do I finish every book I start? Not at all. My book shelves are filled with books sprouting book marks.  And while I still don’t like being without book, the good news is there is no shortage of books and, for those of us on fixed incomes, there are libraries.

By the way,  I finished my first book a week or so after talking with my Dad. I still have it: “The Folded Leaf,” by William Maxwell. 

Memo to OWS: More water and more water still

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once accurately compared the use of non-violent protest in response to injustice to putting water on fire. He said if you throw a bucket of water on a fire and the fire doesn’t go out, it doesn’t mean water doesn’t put out fire. It means you need more water.

It seems to me more and more of this water is being used by the nationwide-and-beyond Occupy Wall Street movement. Some of these actions are achieved in stunningly creative and effective ways. One example would be the  emotionally powerful response exhibited by hundreds of students from the University of California, Davis  after police pepper sprayed students who were doing nothing more than sitting on the ground in support of OWS. The video of this brutality has been viewed  well over half a million times at this writing. University Chancellor Linda P.B.Katehi’s authorization to use police force in response to this non-violent student protest has resulted in justifiable calls for her resignation. You can’t call in law enforcement in full riot gear and then act surprised when they use pepper spray which is essentially what she is doing.

Hundreds of students inflicted a breathtaking display of the power of silence when Katehi walked three blocks to her car after her press conference.

What is becoming increasingly clear is the fact that this movement will not be stopped by pepper-spray or by any other acts of authority-sanctioned violence. The OWS movement is not running out of water. Civil rights movements like this never run out of water. In this case, this truth is stronger than ever. 99% is far bigger than 1%. In other words, the numbers and the water supply are on our side. After all, they’re always on the side of justice.

Inexcusable silence in the face of police brutality

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I can tell you from firsthand experience that there are quite a few good and decent and blazingly courageous members of law enforcement. In fact, it was members of the NYPD that saved my life when I was held up and shot in the head in 1984. Nevertheless, facts are facts.  From Oakland to NYC to Seattle and back there have been and continue to be glaring examples of police brutality inflicted on non-violent protesters who are doing nothing more than exercising the rights our constitution gives them, not to mention drawing attention to the fact the freedom that is supposed to come with being a citizen of the United States of America is slowly but surely disappearing.  Not to mention the fact that the 1% are running the show and are clearly behind the violent response.

And much of the mainstream media is in bed with the 1% because the mainstream media is owned and operated by the 1%. Close to 30,000 New Yorkers marched in NYC the other night. Try finding that in mainstream media. You’re living on another planet of you think the majority of the mainstream media isn’t as invested or nearly as invested in squashing the Occupy Movement as big business and Washington (but I repeat myself) is.

When you see American veterans being physically assaulted by law enforcement, there is silence from the White House and Congressional leaders. When you see 84-year-old women like Dorli Rainey drenched in pepper spray there is silence from the White House and Congressional leaders. When you see non-violent protesters being beaten, doused with pepper spray, punched, trampled by those members of society who are supposed to protect them, the silence of our country’s so-called leaders is deafening in its support for the ongoing brutality.

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Dorli Rainey after being doused by pepper spray by Seattle PD on Nov. 15 2011

The current silence of those in Washington as well as the silence of so many leaders in states and cities across the country when it comes to the violence being inflicted on non-violent protesters is no different than those who remained silent when Alabama’s governor George Wallace and Georgia’s governor Lestor Maddox waved the banner of racism; it is no different than those who remained silent when Birmingham Alabama’s Bull Connor turned fire hoses and police dogs loose on non-violent protesters including children.

As Dante Alighieri said: “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.” Many of our nation’s leaders are booking rooms in  hell as we speak.