When the opening music to the last episode of Mad Men sounded there were tears in my eyes. It wasn’t just the loss of my favorite TV show, but the years I had faithfully followed it since I watched the first one, seven seasons (and eight years) ago, that I saw had slipped away, so fast, as all time passes so much more swiftly the longer we live. When Peggy Olson took her seat as a lowly secretary at the ad agency, I was in Miami, a mere kid of 75, with no idea that I would ever leave and move back to my old hometown of Indianapolis (unexpectedly with a new mitro-valve from a pig!)

For the past year or so, my fellow avid fans of Mad Men debated how the series – and Don Draper, its main man – would end. There was much speculation, inspired by the falling body in the opening credits, that Don would leap from the window of a Manhattan skyscraper. When the opening show of the final two-part season showed Draper downing more drinks (he has already had enough to dispose of his liver) and watching models slink in furs as they posed for his approval, I had a new theory. I foresaw that his (and the show’s) last scene would be a church basement with men and women drinking black coffee out of Styrofoam cups and chain-smoking , as the camera zoomed in on Draper’s face and he spoke the last line of the legendary series: “Hi, I’m Don. I’m an alcoholic.”

I stole that idea from the last line of a terrific mystery novel called Eight Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block, and it was spoken by the private eye of his own series hero, “Matt Scudder,” who’d been struggling with booze like Don Draper. I had the good fortune of meeting Lawrence Block in New York a few years ago, and found he was a Mad Men fan, so I emailed him my prediction for Draper’s end. He responded that his own prediction was that Don would “jump out the window, echoing the falling image from the opening credits.”

Both of us were wrong – and probably millions of others were wrong, too, seduced by the “falling image” that was like an emblem of the show. And Don seemed to be careening generic ambien online no prescription toward that very end in the last episode, but he ended up – as he had once before when in need of renewal – in California. Sick and hung over, he crashed on the couch of an old friend whose daughter was on the way to a self-help retreat up the coast in an Esalen-like setting, and she dragged Don along with her.

An early-seventies style hippie self-help retreat was was the last stop in the world I could imagine for the hard-drinking, sharply cynical Don. Oh no, I thought, fearing they might try to convert him to some kind of pop guru, opening a meditation firm on Madison Avenue. I should not have worried. As people talked about the need for love and connection, and a man told of his feeling of never having been seen or heard or appreciated, Draper spontaneously goes and hugs this stranger. The next day he wakes up and, as Jon Hamm, the actor who made “Don Draper” real and unforgettable, explained his take on it in an interview in The New York Times:

“. . .the next day, he [Draper] wakes up in this beautiful place, and has this serene moment of understanding, and realizes who he is. And who he is, is an advertising man. And so, this thing comes to him. . .”

“This thing” is the famous coke commercial sung by hundreds of people of all ages, sizes and colors [“the 1971 Coca-Cola ‘Hilltop commercial”], as they boom out the chorus:? “I’d like to teach the world to sing/in perfect harmony/ I’d like to buy the world a coke/and keep it company/ That’s the real thing. . .”

Matthew Weiner, the creator/genius behind Mad Men, said in an interview with writer A.M. Homes at The New York Public Library, he thought “Why not end the show with the greatest commercial ever made?”? It was the greatest ending of a television series I have ever seen.

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* Full disclosure – I led workshops in “Spiritual Autobiography” at Esalen on three occasions in the ‘nineties.
**Further Disclosure: this summer I am leading a workshop in Brown County, Indiana, on “Creating Your Memoir.”  I will sing from a hilltop: “I’d like to teach the world to sing. . .”
(See my Facebook for Details)

In the comfortable, breezy Library Lounge at the health spa Rancho La Puerta, one of the participants in my informal afternoon writing workshop read what she had written that day in response to an exercise evoking memories of childhood. Though I try to steer people to what Rilke suggested in his Letters to a Young Poet, and look at childhood as a “treasure house of memory,” some are inevitably led to traumatic experiences. I had never heard any, though, that could match what Phyllis Pilgrim read that afternoon.

“I was in a Japanese concentration prison camp from the time I was five years old to the age of nine,” she began.

Phyllis, who has become a good and valued friend over many years, was Fitness Director at The Ranch, and is still a yoga teacher and special adviser there, where she’s served since 1981. From participation in workshops with me and many other guest writers and editors, and mainly in the way that all books are done – through her own time and focused effort – Phyllis wrote and self-published a remarkable and fascinating book that deserves to be widely known and read: The Hidden Passport: My childhood Journey Through Japanese Concentration Camps in Java.

available on amazon.com and please visit phyllispilgrim.com

Phyllis’s father, a Scotsman who married an American woman, was a chemical engineer who worked for the Shell Oil Company in Java. After Pearl Harbor the Japanese swept down the Asian coast in a matter of weeks, invading Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore, and occupied Java in March of 1942.

“I was five and a half years old when Japanese soldiers took my father away,” Phyllis writes, and she watched as he was ordered into the back of a truck at bayonet point.

Not long after, Phyllis and her mother and two-year old brother Donald were loaded into another truck by Japanese soldiers and taken to Kleina Lengkong Concentration Camp. In the truck, Phyllis’s mother “quietly slipped her American passport into the back of the frilly bloomers beneath my dress. They were the kind with elastic around the legs, so the passport would not fall through.”

In a succession of four different camps over the next four years, Phyllis only wore those “bloomers” when the Japanese were holding inspections so the passport could be hidden in them: “I never grew out of them during those camp years, due to our starvation diet, and the passport was never found!” It was a treasure that enabled her and her family to get quickly home when the war was over.

Phyllis’s mother, a formidable woman when I met her in her nineties, became the de facto leader of the English women in the camps, as she was the only one who would speak up to the Japanese. She taught Phyllis to write by making letters and words in the dirt with a stick. In Tangaray, a transit camp of 5,000 prisoners, they were given chicken-feed corn to eat “that was riddled with weevils and tiny insects and we just had to eat what we were given.”

In the last and most brutal camp, Tjideng, which was barbed-wired off in some suburb, the twice daily allotment of soup had only a handful of cooked rice and “a slimy seaweed substance called Kankong” which Phyllis’ mother was in charge of dividing for forty people in a tiny house. Once a fortnight all were given a hard-boiled duck egg preserved in brine, and Phyllis’s mother gathered any shells that others threw away and mashed them into a fine powder she made her children drink, “hoping you would get a little bit of calcium out of that.” When the camp was liberated, Phyllis little brother Donald had not grown an inch and was so tiny he looked like a three year old instead of a six year old. Her mother weighed seventy-two pounds and had lost an inch in height.

The children were taught to bow – and bow low – every time they saw a Japanese soldier, or else their mother would be punished. Phyllis’s mother tried to spare the children – not always successfully – from the sight of atrocities. The Japanese officer in charge at Tjeding, Captain Sonei, was immaculately dressed, except for wearing carpet slippers most of the month. During the few days around the full moon, he put on his heavy military boots with metal pointed tips, and “reduced everyone to a state of terror.” Once during “tenko,” the counting of lines of prisoners, Sonei decapitated a woman. If a line had not been counted properly the woman in charge of the line was responsible:

“A stumbling explanation or a cowed expression usually resulted in a cruel beating from Sonei’s whip, a thin lathe-like stick, which swished wickedly through the air. Many a tenko resulted in screams, cuts, bruises, and women being beaten to the ground.”

Learning that children had made pets of the dogs around the camp, Sonei ordered all the dogs picked up and put in bags. During an entire night he made the children beat the bags with sticks, until all the dogs had been killed. “The anguished sounds of dogs yelping and boys sobbing filled the night air. . .”

Little wonder that after the war, Phyllis’s parents never spoke of their experience, even to one another. It was only when Phyllis began questioning them in order to better understand her own experience that her parents made a tape-recording of what they remembered. The book she has written and published, with photographs of her as a child, her parents and brother, and a line of women bowing in one of the camps, is a story that hasn’t been told before. It should be included with the WWII literature of survival, and taught in courses on the era.
 Phyllis has practiced and taught yoga since she was twenty-two, and she writes that the daily practice “helped me to find a coherent, even comforting perspective, on life’s seemingly random events. It continues to do this and more as the years go by.”

– Dan Wakefield

Read more about Dan’s workshop “Writing Your Spiritual Autobiography”

**The title of the blog is cheating –there are two of Vonnegut’s friends older than I am! Don Farber, Kurt’s agent, lawyer, friend, and man-for- all-seasons since 1971; and Majie Failey, Kurt’s childhood friend and author of We Never Danced to Cheek, a memoir of her friendship with Kurt.

Phyllis with her mother

When I came back to visit my old high School a year after my graduation in 1950, I confessed to one of my former teachers that I wanted to be a writer. “Well,” he said, stroking his chin, “One boy who went here did that – boy named Vonnegut.”
I learned that “the Vonnegut boy” had graduated from Shortridge High school in 1940, and was writing stories that were getting published in the popular weeklies of the era, like Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post. I was excited to learn that Vonnegut had written a column for The Shortridge Daily Echo, just as I had – and I hurried to the nearest barber shop to find a magazine with one of his stories – a story with a character a lot like our high school band leader. I became a fan, read his first novels, and sent him one of my own first books that drew a warm, funny letter of response. We found we had a bond – both of us were failed high school athletes!
In 1963 I met Kurt for the first time when I was on a Neiman Fellowship in Journalism at Harvard and he was on Cape Cod, supporting three children of his own and three of his late sister’s boys and his wife Jane, a high school sweetheart. He was a tall, shaggy, friendly guy, and we became friends – a friendship sealed when he was instrumental in getting my first novel published by his own publisher, Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte, and reviewed it in Life Magazine. He was “the Godfather” of that novel, Going All The Way. (He let me use his Life review as a Preface to the latest paperback edition, and it also appears in his collection Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons, with the title “Oversexed in Indianapolis.”

Vonnegut became The Godfather of my whole writing career, and was generous, helpful and supportive to the end. That was his character – generous, funny and truthful. “The truth often shocks,” he said, “because we hear it so seldom.” We know it when we hear it – and we always heard it from Kurt even in his graduation speeches, which he wrote fresh every time, rather than having a “canned speech” like most celebrities.
I want to write sometimes about Kurt, his life and works and jokes and wisdom, and the good things he did for me and many other writers and friends, from high school to the end of his life. I also want to write about other people who mean a lot me – not just writers but friends of all kinds who have helped me live this long – I will be 83 in this month of May – an age I never imagined reaching especially in my hard-drinking days in New York and Hollywood.
I will write about age and the misconceptions about it, often from “experts” – it’s not something you learn about in a book or by getting a degree in Gerentology. You have to just get old. In the meantime, please don’t call me “Young Man,” as if it’s some kind of sly put-on – I am an Old Guy and proud of it! When the great writer Irwin Shaw (now unhappily unknown to most younger readers) was asked by Time magazine on his 70th birthday if he was going to retire, he looked shocked and said “Writers don’t retire!” Thank God.

 I also want to blog (I guess that’s a verb now – ugh) every two weeks or so about books that people have forgotten or never knew about – not only by once-famous and now neglected authors like Shaw but by new writers whose books you have never heard of in this over-glutted market –like Leaving Little Havana by Cecelia Fernandez, and The Hidden Passport, by Phyllis Pilgrim, my friend from Rancho La Puerta, the great health spa. I want to write about movies I love, and poets and basketball and sex and food and spirituality. All this can best be summed up by the line of Kurt’s that banners this blog – “Hold onto your hat – we may end up miles from here!”

**The title of the blog is cheating –there are two of Vonnegut’s friends older than I am! Don Farber, Kurt’s agent, lawyer, friend, and man-for- all-seasons since 1971; and Majie Failey, Kurt’s childhood friend and author of We Never Danced to Cheek, a memoir of her friendship with Kurt