Dear readers, I know I promised you months ago to I would continue the saga of The Little Hacienda, and I shall, sometime, but life has intervened in the interim, and I have been thinking more and more, because of losses I cannot put to rest, of a sweet time when we were very young and still together, with all our life before us.  This, then, is a brief history of The Flower Avenue Gang, a chance gathering, for a brief time, of beautiful, extraordinary people who deeply affected our life.

We arrived in Washington as newly-weds for my posting at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in February of 1971, fresh from a year in San Antonio and a hastily arranged wedding in Daytona Beach, and thankful for our good fortune in the midst of an ugly war.  We were joined there by my good friend Dean Glosson, with whom I had trained in San Antonio, and his wife Frannie, expecting their first child.  Because Walter Reed had no on-base housing, we had to find our own lodging, and we did, Barbara and I, and our little dog Jimmie, at an ugly, massive apartment complex called Summit Hill, just north of the District in Silver Spring, and Dean and Frannie at a nearly equally depressing place not far away.  Dean and I were assigned to the same ward, a neurosurgical unit on the ground floor of the old Walter Reed facility.  I was making $525 a month, with a small housing allowance, but we lived well, even buying a spanking new Chevy Nova off the showroom floor on East West Highway that year.  Barbara worked in a bank down near the Cathedral for the first few months, then was accepted in a Dietetics Internship at Freedman’s Hospital, Howard University.  She agonized for several days whether to take it or not, but Frannie intervened one night, and told her she would regret it forever if she didn’t do it.  She took it.

Most days Barbara took the bus downtown to Howard and I took the car to Walter Reed.  I worked on an open ward, a nurses station at one end, then twenty or so beds on either side of the ward all the way to a kind of porch at the other end, which housed six beds, for high ranking officers, when we got them.  On one side of the nurses station was a private room, and on the other, a four-bed ICU.  The open ward was set up to accomodate fresh post-op spinal cord injuries on one side, and recovering boys on the other, including a lot of head injuries.  The spinal cord injuries, both Viet Nam casualities and stateside accidents, were sent to us on Foster Frames, a medieval kind of contraption consisting of a tight canvas sheet stretched on a steel frame on which the patient lay.  Nearly all also had crutchfield tongs, a large caliper device with screws into the side of the skull, which was attached by a cable to a set of free-hanging weights on a pulley at the head of the bed, which acted as traction on the spine.  There was absolutely no side to side turning.  Every two hours we were supposed to turn the patient, which entailed placing another canvas and steel rack on top of the guy, strapping it down, then flipping him over, and removing the canvas he had been laying on.  Day and night, every two hours, back to front.  For weeks, until they were stable enough to move to a regular bed and begin physical therapy.  These were paraplegics and quadraplegics, boys who would never walk again, some of whom would have no movement from the neck down.

We rotated all three shifts, generally ten days and four off.  Me, Dean, Wendy Frank, Steve O’Malley, and a guy whose name I can’t remember, and Kelly and Browner, two D.C. civilian locals.  Our Wardmaster was Sgt. James Jefferson, a hard-boiled medic with two Viet Nam tours under his belt, but a compassionate and fair man who treated us like sons.  Years after our discharges, he was still calling to see how we were doing.

The ten nights on, 11-7, were the toughest, but also, in a way, the most beautiful.  It was when you really got to know people, their stories, their pain, and sometimes, wrenching tragedy.  We had a kid that first year named Patrick Fawltenski, fourteen years old, and a military dependent.  He had spinal cord tumors, which kept recurring, despite multiple surgeries, but was a full-on trooper, with an attitude that kept everybody positive.  We all loved him.  One night, me, Dean, and O’Malley on, O’Malley took him in for a bath in the latrene.  Pat was pretty functional, despite his weakness, and O’Malley left him in the tub and stepped out into the ward for a smoke.  In those days you could smoke anywhere, and we did.  When he went back in, barely two minutes later, Pat was under water, and unresponsive.  We worked on him for over an hour, but we lost him.  O’Malley, of course, was devastated, even though the autopsy showed Pat had died of a respiratory arrest and did not drown.  None of us got over it.

And then there was Gary Ledbetter, twenty-three, a quadraplegic from diving into a shallow lake while AWOL.  Ledbetter was my special project, and I got to know him very well, especially on nights.  We talked a lot because he didn’t sleep much, even after he moved into a regular bed.  One night, after he’d been there about five weeks, he called me over and told me he had been working really hard in PT, and was now able to use his hands and arms.  I was overjoyed.  It meant so much that he was at least going to have that function.  Duties interrupted, and I set about emptying urinals, and turning patients.  Toward dawn he called me over again and said, “I was just shitting you, man.  I can’t move a thing.”  The things you remember.

Most of our guys moved to a VA hospital when they left us, and from there, I don’t know what happened to them.  Urinary tract infections usually got them eventually.  When Sgt. Jeff called for the last time some seven years later, he said Ledbetter was still alive.  After that, I don’t know.

When our year lease was up at Summit Hill, Barbara found an apartment in a small complex on Flower Avenue in Tacoma Park and we moved there.  As luck would have it, another apartment was available just across the hall from us, and Dean, Frannie, and their baby boy, Josh, moved in.   Other friends joined us as apartments became available.  Linda Dunn, one of our nurses on Ward 10, and her husband Tim moved into an adjacent building, and Danny and Kathy Osborne, friends of Tim and Linda from upstate New York, took an apartment on the ground floor of our building.

I was playing a lot of guitar in those days and writing songs, all of which was heavily encouraged by this gang, on a nightly basis, fueled by cheap wine and cannabis.  Danny had a friend who was a sound engineer, a kid named James, and it was arranged for me to lay down some tracks at a studio James worked with.  Early one Saturday morning, with Danny driving, he, Tim and I went looking for the studio in D.C.  As expected, the chemistry kicked in and we got hopelessly lost.  The studio was in a building that housed WHFS radio, a very popular FM station, known as “Bigger than a breadbox radio.”  At one point, amid a rash of giggling, Danny pulled over and asked a kid on a bike, “Hey, can you tell us where Bigger than a breadbox radio is?”  Amazingly, he knew; we actually weren’t far away, and we eventually made it.  I laid down five songs, and we were done.  I thought it was pretty good, but I didn’t hear from the studio for several months, as we were packing to leave for Tallahassee, actually, asking if I wanted to do some commercial work.  I didn’t, we left, and that was that.

Sort of.  On another occasion Tim arranged for me to play at a place out in Maryland called “The Tin Dipper.”  They had a Thursday night contest where you got up and sang with the house band, and the weekly winner got to be on the radio.  I was next to last on the program and played, “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.”  The band was perfect, and we killed it.  Following me was a blind guy who sang some soulful country ballad, who killed it even deader.  His name was Ronnie Millsap.  End of story.

Between our apartment and the Glosson’s across the hall was another in which lived a family called Rides-at-the-Door.  They were Lakota Sioux, and on Saturday nights, they had a Native American drum circle in their apartment.  They had two beautiful little daughters, and were amazingly lovely neighbors.  They went back to Montana at one point while we were there and he brought us back a hunk of venison.  Rancid venison, as it turned out, but it was the thought.  Unfortunately, Mr. Rides-at-the-Door was a sad drinker, and many a morning I would see meet him staggering in as I was going out to work.

In June of that year I was diagnosed with bilateral inguinal hernias, from yanking around big, inert GIs, and surgery was scheduled to repair them.  They decided to do two separate operations, so I had the first, then had a thirty-day recuperative leave, then the other, and another thirty-day leave.  We had no AC so I spent a large part of those sixty days soaking in cool water in the bathtub.  It was during one of those soaks that Dean came in and told me that Rick Gilson, another of our pals from the San Antonio days who had also come to DC, had committed suicide.  Rick had already been discharged, and was living in Connecticut.  His life-long dream was to go to medical school, but he’d been rejected multiple times.  I guess he couldn’t live with that.

But the real story is the bonds we formed that year on Flower Avenue.  We were kids, still learning how to be adults, all of us in love, and dependent on each other in a way that would never be equaled.  Jam sessions and marathon record listening down in Danny’s apartment, walks up to the Flower Avenue Theater for movies, Sligo Creek Park in the snow, badminton in the yard, trust and sharing, putting it all together.  On my days off I played guitar all day in the apartment alone.  I didn’t know until recently that Frannie, across the hall with baby Josh, was listening, and loving it.  That is special.  When we got out Barbara and I moved back to Tallahassee, and Dean and Frannie and Josh came to visit.  We then moved to the Daytona Beach area and Danny and Kathy moved to a town nearby, and we saw them frequently for a few years.  Tim and Linda ultimately divorced, and Tim moved to the area and remarried.  Tim died three years ago.  Danny and Kathy have endured some rough times but are still together.  We saw them at Tim’s funeral, but not since.  We remained close to Dean and Frannie, and have come to know Josh and his beautiful family.  And then Dean died last spring, and that’s what got me thinking again about The Flower Avenue Gang, because that time sits out there somewhere eternally, whole, intact, and beautiful, and always associated with my friend Dean.  See, despite all I know; fifteen years as a hospice nurse dealing with death, I was not ready, or have been able to successfully assimilate Dean’s death.  How can I?  Dean was, and is, eternal, an integral part of a time that never grows old, never dies.  It doesn’t fit.  When we last saw him, the four of us spent several wonderful days in a cabin on lake Superior in the UP of Michigan.  Barbara, Frannie and I sat bundled in blankets on the beach, while Dean did a swim in the 50 degree water, loving it.  Not macho; just Dean.  Loving it.