What To Write
A Sunday morning warmed by our life-giving sun greeted me on March 18. Yesterday was occupied with a leisurely breakfast with an old friend. By definition old friends are rare. Time and space separate us. An old friend knows the young adult that we were, and the battles that we fought and survived in the old days. We are both survivors of that time. Did we not stand together in the Hot Gates, against impossible odds –and we lived.
The afternoon and evening was spent at a house-party, 60th birthday celebration at the home of a family member. As a spouse, a daughter, friends, neighbors told stories of appreciation for deeds of kindness done without hesitation in years past by Pat who just turned sixty years of age– I wondered at my good fortune to be included within this family related by blood, marriage and the bonds of friendship. Words fail to do justice to my good fortune. I never imagined this possibility.
Later in the evening I received from a good friend, lines of a newly written poem. A writer and a poet who has not written for a few years has picked up the pen. My spirit was elevated by the prospect. Perhaps Homer is smiling in the afterlife? Here is a bit of the language of the poem. Can you guess that it is a political poem?
We livin’ in God’s country!
But which god, which country, which tribe, which team
does he/she/it want to win….
and
We’re toast.
Cracked in half by half-baked idiots
who would rather drown in a rising sea
than admit they’re wrong.
I have a few more pages to conclude American War by Omar El Addad. I am a Southerner, a North Carolinian. I know my great Uncle Thomas’ story who suffered a Yankee bullet wound in the head. That was in the war of 1864. I get what El Akkad’s good prose is saying. Here are a few additional quotes:
You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.
“Why’d you do it?” she asked me.
“I just wanted to know.”
“Don’t ever apologize for that.” she said. “That’s all there is to life, is wanting to know.”
So many terrible things made you this way, but I don’t have to live with what made you, I have to live with what you are. And I know you don’t find me worth loving either.
But I’ll love you anyway. And your brother will love you anyway. And your nephew will love you anyway. That’s what family does.
“Come here,” she said. shook my head. “I’m scared.”
“Good,” she said. “Now you have something you can kill. Come here.”I faced down the river. Everything I had known of the world suddenly felt very far away. I saw that beyond the river there was a high wall, lined with razor wire and manned by guards. And although I wouldn’t be able to articulate what I felt until much later, I knew then that the bulk of the world was just like this: wild unvaccinated, malicious. I stepped into the river.
