Christmas Day 2020

It is a lazy Christmas afternoon when the kids have disappeared to their respective places in the house to enjoy their gifts and share them with friends through the magical ether of electromagnetic waves.

I have sunk to the basement recliner in quasi-darkness where I hear the hum of the furnace most clearly.  My wife is napping in the lower living room on our red love seat content with the fruit of her holiday labors.  

I’ve read the first chapter of my Christmas present while sipping on some coffee that I dropped a black licorice toffee into in lieu of cream or sugar.  It is a bit bitter at first, taking some time for the toffee to melt.

The book is fantastical and dreamlike and when I fall off into my nap I am still reading it behind closed lids, scanning the pages and knowing that is impossible, but that is how dreams work.  I hear the occasional plodding of the dog roaming the house overhead on hardwood floors.

At some point my son finds me here and touches my nose with his forefinger which immediately pulls me out of sleep.  He laughs and I feel grateful that he is in my world on this snowy day of days when a child sleeping in his mother’s arms transformed the world with love all those years ago.

***

The Point of a Star

 

When your world 

is turned upside down

like a Christmas Tree 

balanced on the point 

of a star

Just lie there

on the floor

looking upwards

as you are and drink

in the beauty

Of the absurdity 

of what you 

do not understand

but trust will be 

redeemed by love.

***

Into the Wild

 

“I now walk into the wild.”

It was the last words of Chris McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, written on a postcard to a friend before he walked into the Alaskan wilderness.  Four months later he was dead.

His post-college adventures included a kind of ascetic lifestyle that was preparing him for this audacious attempt to “live off the land” in an abandoned bus rarely occasioned by hunters in this isolated piece of Alaska.

It’s not that he didn’t like people.  He was deeply loved by those who had the good fortune of crossing his path for a time and were enriched by the experience.  I read their accounts in Jon Krakauer’s book “Into the Wild” as well as saw it played out in the Sean Penn movie of the same name. This was due in great part to his shedding of superficial concerns and focussing on what is most essential to simply being human.  He made connections with people who saw his heart, honesty, and hard work as a rare commodity in a consumer-driven society where short cuts and pleasure-seeking cheapen so much in and around us.

I was fascinated to learn online that Chris has had his “detractors” or those who think he was just a foolish kid who threw his life away.  I understand why some would think that but I also think they don’t *get* him or really understand his motivations.  These were motivations that likely included seeking a deeper experience of the world by looking inward and minimizing external distractions.  For someone who lacks an inner life the “external distractions” may be all they think exists and can be grasped.

Here I’m reminded of words by Fr. Roman Braga, the spiritual father of a monastery I visited a few times in my twenties.  He had spent 11 years in the Romanian gulag as a young man (a year of that in solitary confinement) and spoke about an “inner universe” that is vastly more expansive than the external universe we know with its innumerable stars and galaxies.  It is in this inner universe where we find the connection with God who transcends time and space.  Didn’t Jesus tell us “the Kingdom of God is within you”?  And what is larger than that?

So, I think his motivations were noble despite the fact it turned out tragically.  I sought this type of escape oftentimes as a younger man traveling around the globe in search of something deeper in myself.  It oftentimes put me in perilous situations but I always found a way through, looking for whatever might be just around the next bend.  Maybe God Himself was sitting there on a stool smoking a pipe and waiting for me to arrive for a chat.  And then as T.S. Elliot would have it “What we call the beginning is often the end.  And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”

My travels came to an end.  Unlimited freedom came to an end (and none too soon for me to live out a few more years if truth be told).  I had a family and carried on but in a different way of looking for that place that Chris thought he found by escaping into the wild.

*** 

The Flying Rake

 

The flying rake,

wind in his tines.

Fall has come

and bids him

Brothers, to arms!

Leaves are falling.

Beat them back!

***

Birds on a Wire

 

I sit with my friends every morning on the wire and feel the breeze envelop me, a game of poise and balance.  We are mostly silent, introspective, thinking survival thoughts but also the occasional existential question flits through.  Why do we fly in the sky?  

From this vantage point I see the people speeding by on the elevated ribbon below, their courses fixed and directional.  Another existential thought or two flies through without lingering.  What is simplicity?  Freedom?  I love this time to sit and think on a wire.

***

WINDOWS

 

Paintings are windows on the world.

But before frames circumscribed our

view, there were these rectangled 

openings in our homes & buildings.

Glancing out of them 

the enormity of the great outdoors was

suddenly manageable to our finite

minds if not infinite desires to grasp

the place where we find ourselves.

***

The Thrills and Spills of Kenpo Karate

It was a glimmer of light in the darkness of my middle school misery.  A neighbor boy was taking karate and somehow I got invited to come along and see what it was all about.  It was in the basement of a church in Paoli, Indiana which was one town south of ours.  The Sensei was the owner of a local radio station and the epitome of manliness with his black belt and black 70’s ‘stache.  My first impression was seeing him stand in front of the class in the classic horse stance yelling out commands as rows of fellow middle-schoolers punched the air with a loud synchronous “KEE-YA!”

I was duly impressed with the spectacle and told my Dad I wanted to join this group of warriors-in-training.  I ordered my gi and went shopping for an athletic cup with jock strap holder.  To be honest, it was the cup that had me most stoked.  When your boy-bits need full protection it’s about to get real.  So the neighbor boy’s Mom picked me up and drove us to my first official class.  It was winter time and the tile floor of the church basement was cold on our bare feet after changing into our gi’s in the bathroom.  The cup was tested for proper placement with a firm rap from my knuckles.  

That first class ended with a Simon Says-type  competition to execute the move yelled out by the Sensei without delay or error.  There were about 15 kids there and they were falling like flies.  The winner of this game would get a cool iron-on for the back of his gi that included two large Chinese characters that denoted we were practicing “Kenpo Karate”.  It was down to just me and another kid when I punched instead of kicked.  I was disappointed but not deterred.  A week later I was ultra-focussed and able to win my iron-on badge of excellent obedience.

This was the era of the late 70’s/early 80’s when safety was not foremost in anyone’s mind, especially when it came to male children.  At times the Sensei, or his adult brown-belted assistant, would have us put our backs against the wall in a seated position and keep us hanging there until our stomach muscles and legs started to burn and spasm.  But wait, that’s not all!  They would then come around with a wooden club and hit us in the stomach with it to further toughen us up.  KEE-OUCH!

Another example of this was when he would have us all stand in a large circle with our arms held out to our sides parallel with the ground.  When he stood in front of you you had to stand perfectly still and accept getting punched in the stomach with a loud KEE-YA to try and dissipate the blow.  Some of us flinched and fell backwards when he appeared to begin his strike, so he would wait for us to recover in order to receive the full benefit of his punch.

And then there was poor sweet Benjy.  He was a skinny freckled blonde boy with a disarming smile that made everyone love him.  He stood bravely before the Sensei with a closed wooden door about 3 feet behind him.  The Sensei did not even wait for Benjy to mentally prepare himself but immediately launched into a skip with side kick that lifted Benjy up off the ground and carried him through the air, body hitting the door, and slumping to the floor like a rag doll, dazed.  Our eyes were the size of ping pong balls.  He killed Benjy!  But then Benjy let out a good natured groan and slowly got back up on his spindly legs while holding his stomach, a sheepish grin on his face.

My turn was coming.  It was another night and we were sparring against each other when I found myself in the middle of the circle with the Sensei as my opponent.  I did not think it was going to be a particularly fair fight, but when my name was called there was no walking away or leaving for that matter.  It was winter after all and I was barefoot in only a loose fitting white uniform with jock strap.  So, we stood facing each other and he gave the command to bow.  He bowed, I bowed, and that’s when it hit me.  

What hit me?  Well, his foot to be exact.  Apparently it is an unspoken rule in karate that you must never take your eye off of your opponent.  When I was at the depth of my bow looking down at the floor he snap kicked his foot straight into my abdomen.  I immediately collapsed to the floor unable to breathe.  I was making some kind of gasping gargly noise with all the breath knocked out of me.  I thought I was going to die because no matter what I did my lungs would not fill up with air.  The Sensei took a knee beside me and kept telling me to “breathe out” which seemed counter-intuitive, but I tried and after what seemed an eternity I found I could breathe again.

Another activity that had the potential to end badly was the “leaping over all your fellow students” exercise which I loved.  It started with a piano bench sitting next to a mat which you jumped over head first, landed on your hands, tucked your head, and rolled.  After everyone finished jumping the bench a student was instructed to get on all fours next to the bench and you would jump over him and the bench.  This was repeated by adding another kid, etc.

There was a tall and lanky boy who I’ll never forget.  He did not look particularly coordinated walking around the church basement-cum-dojo, but when he took to the air to jump over the obstacle his legs would fan out into a Y-shape as his body made a high arcing curve.  When he landed he could execute a perfect tuck and roll up to a standing position in one fluid motion.  It was a thing of beauty and grace that I never tired of watching.  

As each student added himself to the line of bodies to jump over the excitement in the room grew.  At about 5 bodies the number of volunteers quickly dwindled until at 7 bodies the beautiful swan diving student gave up and there was only me left to attempt it.  I backed up almost to the entrance at the far end of the room and took off running as fast as I could across the basement floor.  When I reached the bench I launched myself nearly vertical over the students, aiming for just past that last kid.  It was not pretty but I cleared them with nothing to spare and my “roll” was more like a land, head tuck, body slam and bounce at the far end.  I was willing to attempt 8 kids but I believe the Sensei sensed disaster and ended the exercise.

Returning to the subject of sparring, after several weeks of classes we got to put on boxing gloves and were paired up to fight.  I was facing the neighbor boy whose Mom was giving us rides to the classes and when Sensei said “fight!” I fought!  I pummeled the poor kid, releasing all my pent up anger and frustrations on him (there was no lack of that in middle school).  He had this frightened look in his eye that seemed to be asking me to let up or show mercy, but Sensei wasn’t having it.  “Get your hands up!  Fight back!” he yelled.  But then the neighbor boy started crying and the match was stopped.  

That may have been my last class because I lost my ride soon thereafter and there would be no transition for me from white belt to yellow belt that a few others had recently made.  Now as an adult and parent I can only surmise that my beat down of the neighbor boy was directly responsible for him quitting and/or his mother no longer giving me rides, though at the time that thought did not even cross my mind.

***

There are a few other loose ends of memory that need to be tied up before I finish.

The adult assistant (who was a brown belt in Kenpo as I mentioned earlier) was highly skilled in the martial arts, even more so than the Sensei it would seem, and had likely studied other martial arts as he had an old faded black gi.  During classes he would sometimes walk around working his nunchucks at a high rate of speed which was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen.  

When we did an exhibition at the halftime of a Paoli High School basketball game he further wowed us with a crazy flying kick.  He had two men stand on chairs and hold a piece of wood between them at their head level.  It was well above his own head and nearly level with the basketball rim.  He was rather short but he ran and leapt into the air and extended his leg with a high kicking motion busting the board in two sending the pieces flying!  

It was a few years later when I was in high school that I learned he had been shot and killed in a bar.  Apparently he had gotten into a fight with someone and they knew they were outmatched and so pulled a gun and shot him.  As the song says, “for all those born beneath an angry star, lest we forget how fragile we are.”

And not too long after that I learned that poor sweet Benjy had prematurely passed as well, riding his dirt bike in the country, body thrown one last time and killed at the age of 16.

Pealing Paint

 

Life has a way of pealing your paint,

sharing in the work of helping remove

the accretions of time and carelessness

as we grow older and less self-obsessed.

***

Find this Place

 

Suspended in the dark unknowing

of retained innocence.

Find this place. 

Rediscover love in the days 

before the world crushed your heart.

***

Russia ‘98

 

Walking the highways and byways 

of Russia 

as a pilgrim all those years ago,

sometimes a destination in mind 

but more often simply wandering 

free to see what there was to see, 

capturing it with a cheap camera

in the days before digital everything, 

an analog heart in a vast land 

awakening from a deep slumber.

***

Reading “Everyday Saints”

 

I found two bookmarks in the one book which for me is a rare phenomenon.  Like movies, there are precious few books that I’ve revisited in my lifetime.  Something about those initial reactions that I prize maybe a little too highly.  God knows repeated readings of particular books can yield up varied treasures.

But there it is, maybe a hang up but also not an ironclad principle.  “Everyday Saints” by Archimandrite Tikhon is an exception to this rule.  I read it when it was first published in 2011 over a 3 day period when I was bed bound from a particularly nasty flu.  It was the perfect companion because it made the time flow by with little notice.

The stories are vignettes of varying lengths that claim the Pskov Caves Holy Dormition Monastery in Pechory, Russia as their home base and heart, but spread out over nearly the entirety of that vast country as the author travels hither, thither, and yon.  Each story focuses in on a particular person bringing to light their quirks and foibles in the context of the oftentimes inscrutable workings of Divine grace.  It is cliche, but I don’t know of a book that had me literally LOL’ing, becoming tearful at some particularly poignant moment, or gasping in surprise to the extent this one did.

In my twenties I read an inordinate number of books that explored the impact of Communism on Russia, Eastern Europe, and China.  Many of them were nonfiction like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago”, Pu Ning’s “Red in Tooth and Claw”, and “The Private Life of Chairman Mao” written by his personal physician.   But there was also fiction in the novels of Milan Kundera and Boris Pasternak.  I seemingly could not get enough of this type of thing, but with “Everyday Saints” I found something even more intriguing.  Instead of unredeemed melancholy (an addiction of mine) I found something healing and life affirming.  

Like the Bible it is a book that can be read for spiritual nourishment, but is also a collection of simply human stories that could be enjoyed by anyone who shares that humanity regardless of their beliefs. 

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware has sagely said: "It is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder."  And this is Everyday Saints in a nutshell.

***

Apple Ladder

 

Beauty’s an apple ladder

beholden to red spheres 

of ascending sweetness.

***

Doors of Insanity

Since when did life become 

so fragmented

so pixelated

so prone 

to open the doors of insanity?

***

The Trolley

His body lay slumped across the tracks forming the cross bar of a very long H.  Lucky for him the trams had stopped running hours before.  He’d been drinking for much of the day but now it was the middle of the night and he was on a reluctant journey back to consciousness.  His head felt stuffed with cotton buzzing like high voltage wires when the light appeared over the hill.

Somewhere deep inside his brain some synapses began firing to sound the alarm.  He grunted with pain trying to reanimate his cold and stiff body.  The light appeared to be a ways off but headed in his direction.  His arms refused to obey his commands, only his right leg responded by cocking as if to push off.  The light remained small and steady moving down the center of the tram tracks and he thought he heard a small bell, “da-ling, da-ling.”

It seemed almost upon him even though the light was much too small to be anywhere near, but there it was nonetheless rolling to a stop a few feet away, the size of a shoe box.  It was a red trolley that whistled and rolled back and forth to approximate speech.  As his mind continued to find purchase in reality he tried to remember where he’d seen such a thing before. 

“Da-ling, da-ling” *whistle-whistle* “da-ling” *whistle*.  It was imploring him to come along which he could understand though he didn’t understand how he understood.  

“You want me to come with you?”  It quivered in acknowledgement.  “OK.”  His vision blurred out and things went dark.

***

When he opened his eyes again he was lying in front of a castle that loomed above him in miniature proportions.  “Who is this lying in front of my castle?” bellowed a small frozen-faced figure leaning over the castle wall above him.

“It appears to be a ragamuffin, Your Majesty,” answered a smaller version of the crowned figure.

“A ragamuffin?  Who has allowed such a thing in my kingdom?”  Trolley dinged and whistled a confession to make it clear he was the guilty party.  “What is the meaning of this, Trolley?”

At this a woman appeared and knelt down to check on the bewildered man lying there.  “Are you alright, dear sir?”  Looking up she addressed the small man with the crown, “Uncle Friday, he looks like someone who needs our help.  Might I take responsibility for him while he is in your kingdom?”

“Very well, but please find him some more presentable attire, Lady Aberlin.  I don’t want others to get the idea that being unpresentable is appropriate.  I will have no ragamuffins in my kingdom.”

“As you wish, Your Majesty.”  She helped the bewildered man to his feet and led him weaving past a tree and around a bend so as to be outside of the view of the castle.  “Here’s a good spot.  Let’s sit you down.  You look a little unsteady.”  She assisted him with a kind of controlled fall to a seated position at the base of a stone wall.  

“Now you stay here and I will find Robert Troll.  He should have some clothes that might fit you.  I’ll be right back, OK?”  He looked at her with a kind of bleary-eyed affection and nodded with an exaggerated bobbing of his head. 

Lady Aberlin disappeared further along the path and he sat there taking in his surroundings as best he could, his head clearing by the minute.  There was a tree and a grandfather clock nearby and it was all starting to look strangely familiar.  It was the image of the trolley that wove its way through the decades of accumulated fog that was his memories.  He had somehow been transported to the Neighborhood of Make Believe.  

***

“My, my, what *is* that smell?”  Above him a ruddy cheeked puppet was whipping her large nose back and forth sniffing the air in an exaggerated manner.  Her fixed eyes eventually found the man, “It looks like someone left a large pile of reeking rags below my museum.”

“Excuse me?” The man said as he looked upward.  “Are you referring to me?”

The puppet pulled back in surprise.  “Well, Toots, you’ve picked an interesting spot to deposit yourself.  Why are you here?”

The man struggled to his feet and steadied himself with the wall in order to look at the puppet more on the level.  “I was banished here by King Friday until I can find more presentable clothes.”

“King Friday sent you packing?  I think I’m starting to like you, Toots.”

At this Lady Aberlin returned with some clothes and handed them to the man.  “I see you’ve met Lady Elaine.  Has she been nice to you?”

“In a manner of speaking” replied the man as he began taking his clothes off to change but then paused, “Is this an OK place to change?”

“Well, I guess it is as good a place as any.  Let’s turn our backs, Lady Elaine, and allow him some privacy.”  

“If it helps him smell better quicker I will gladly do so,” and the ruddy puppet disappeared behind her wall.

***

The man felt ridiculous in the baggy clothes and he refused to put on the hat.  Lady Elaine reappeared at the top of the wall to see if he was still there.  “Well, aren’t you a vision!  Would you like to visit my Museum-Go-Round now that you’re more presentable?”  

The building she was referring to was too small even for her to enter and the man thought she was making fun of him.  She sensed his skepticism.  “Come on, Toots.  I’ll show you how it’s done.”  At this she offered her hand.  As soon as he touched her he felt himself reverse telescoping through the colorful pillars and into the darkness of the open double doors.

He found himself in the middle of a large circular room, a spotlight fixing him in a small circle of light.  Even stranger still he was no longer a man, but a boy.  

“Hello?” He snapped his head around to see where the high-pitched voice was coming from before realizing it was coming from his own mouth.  “Hello?  Is anyone there?”

The curved wall of the room was divided into illumined alcoves of uniform size encircling the boy.  In each alcove was a large framed photo.  He walked towards the one directly in front of him and shuddered as he recognized it as an upraised arm wielding a looped leather belt.  Moving to his right he stood in front of the next photo which was the same arm and belt but slightly lower.  The next one was lower still and the next one lower still until he got to one where the belt had disappeared off the bottom of the frame.  He heard if not felt a loud slap and suddenly burst into tears.  He was halfway around the room and in the next photo the belt reappeared at the bottom of the frame and the pattern repeated, but moving upwards instead of down.

The boy half ran, half stumbled back to the center of the room under the spotlight.  As he watched in bewilderment the wall began to rotate around him like a carousel while he stood stock still in the center.  The images became a single moving image of the arm wielding the belt coming down swiftly and returning up and then back down, over and over again.

  

***

It’s a church basement, light filtering through a high screened window.  His thin wrist is being held firmly above his head as he spins like a ball on a tether trying to avoid getting hit by the belt, his pants around his ankles.

“I’m sorry Mom, I’m sorry Mom, please stop, I’ll never do it again” jumping... panting... sobbing... “I promise, I promise, PLEASE, I promise!”

The slapping sound of leather meeting flesh bounces off cinderblock walls and echoes down a darkened hallway, but not loud enough for anyone else to hear.  There will be no rescue.  It is unbearable, but he must bear it.

***

He felt himself shaking or being shaken.  “Hey, wake up!  You can’t sleep in the middle of the street.”  Through the blur of tears it appeared there was a policeman standing over him and for a moment he thought it might be Officer Clemmons.  

“Wuh?  Sorry, I... I...” head pounding he rubbed his eyes and temples vigorously.  When the flashing spots of light resolved the man was gone.  He found his feet with some difficulty and made his way to the sidewalk just as a tram trundled past at his back.  He turned to watch it disappear into a swirl of fog leaving him alone in the diffuse glow of early morning... “da-ling”.


***

The Fog Settles

The fog settles on the city

like a down filled blanket

softening the edges of a 

hard and indifferent place.

***

2000 Souls

Orleans, Indiana is a town of 2000 souls and from 1975 to 1985 I was one of those souls, albeit a small one.  There were pockets of darkness hidden in neighborhoods that I mostly avoided but sometimes brushed up against for the briefest of moments.  

My Dad was a pastor and it was expected I would not hang out with the “bad” kids, but that was OK because I was mostly a loner anyway.  I had friends, but none that wouldn’t turn on me in a heartbeat if expedient to do so.  Maybe it was something about me?  

I spent much of my time roaming the streets of this town on my bike.  There were no helmets, no cell phones, and no sense that something could go terribly wrong.  And if it did, it passed me over and found some other kid or family to haunt for years to come.

There was the town square with the drug store and its comic book rack, the movie theater showing “First Blood”, a ceramics store where my Mom painted things to decorate our house, and the variety store with three levels of secondhand treasures.

There was the high school with its palatial basketball gym but primitive cinder track, the elementary school with Patton Field for Little League games, and the nearby airstrip with ultralights waiting to take to the sky like giant mechanical dragonflies.  

There was melancholy by the rick load though I didn’t really know what that was back then.  It was the air I breathed and a persistent heaviness in my chest.  It drew me at times to the massive cemetery to brood, the quietest of quiet places.

And it is the town that most thoroughly put its stamp on me, a decade of growth and development from 1st to 10th grade in the heart of Southern Indiana.  I love it in the way someone would love a good-enough parent because that’s who raised you.

***

The Fog Monster

  

The fog monster

devours the city

in forgetfulness.

*

Alas, Poor Aaroneous...

Alas, poor Aaroneous.  I knew him well.

Pitiful impulsive man-boy, lost in a world and situation outside of his control, proud in his ignorance with illusions of invulnerability.  It was March of 1991 when he found himself almost two months into a 16 week Basic Training cycle on Sand Hill at Ft. Benning, Georgia.  

***

He’d been a senior at Indiana Wesleyan Univeristy just two months prior and due to a premature midlife crisis he’d made the seemingly inexplicable decision to join the Army after GHWB declared war on Iraq.  Something burned in his patriotic breast.  It may have been reflux.

Or maybe it was depression that drove him to this madness, but whatever it was he found a way to turn it into an adventure of sorts.  BFF Tibor was brought along for the ride to a mystery location off campus.  When they pulled up catty-cornered to the recruiting station the Hungarian looked at the coffee shop next door to it and exclaimed, “Buddy!  We’re going to have coffee.  How nice!”  

“We’re not here for coffee, Tibor.”  He followed Aaroneous out of the car and into the Army recruiting office where the wayward college senior announced he wanted to join the infantry.  Within an hour it was a done deal, the papers signed, and his parents didn’t even know yet.

***

So here he was on Sand Hill where the days are like weeks, the weeks are like months, and the months are like years.  Sleep was scarce and highly regimented with a regular fireguard duty rotating trainees through an allnight roster one hour at a time patrolling the barracks with a flashlight.  Days were spent strenuously from before sun-up to after sun-down.

There was complete deprivation of contact with the outside world apart from the precious few times allotted to call home which could just as easily be taken away if someone in your platoon screwed up.  Most were rule-followers to minimize any extra misery doled out by the Drill Sergeants, but Aaroneous was different in that way.  He was quiet, unassuming, boyishly naïve, but a lot went on behind those hazel green eyes of his.

In that first week when the scrutiny was at its highest intensity and trainees were afraid to breathe wrong, Aaroneous slipped out at an opportune moment and cut through an adjacent forest to the back of the base PX.  When the sidewalk next to it was empty he stepped out from the shadow of the trees to walk casually into the PX and buy some Skittles.  Back at the barracks lights-out was drawing near but there was some time to relax just a bit before the on duty Drill Sergeant came to do the last headcount of the day.

Aaroneous laid on his side and casually spilled out his Skittles onto the bunk where only the trainee next to him could see them.  The young man’s eyes widened considerably before breaking into a perplexed grin. “Holy shit Haney!  Where did you get Skittles?”  At that point early in the cycle there were frequent inspections to make sure we did not possess any contraband and the borders of the barracks were considered sacrosanct and off limits on pain of mental and physical torture.  He shared them with this bemused fellow and a few others who treated it like some exotic food from a faraway land.  “I’ve totally guessed you wrong, Haney.  Goddam!”

***

So, we are back again to almost two months into Basic Training.  In retrospect it was the be-all end-all of quarantine and shelter-at-home type scenarios.  Aaroneous felt his personhood was beginning to erode under the dehumanizing conditions and isolation.  He needed a break of some kind.  A few days earlier they’d marched past the base movie theater and he noticed the marquee was featuring Mel Gibson in Hamlet.  Maybe not his first choice but almost anything would do.  

Once again he found a time that he could slip off unobtrusively and hightail it the half-mile or so to the theater without being seen.  It was glorious!  He luxuriated in the soft theater seats and took in the Shakespearean spectacle of Mad Max emoting.  It is impossible to describe the pleasure of such a thing after so many weeks of being made to feel one is not a human being.  He laughed.  He cried.  And right as it was getting to its most powerful moment with his emotions at a fevered pitch he glanced down at his watch... 5 minutes until lights-out.

He literally jumped up from his seat and ran out of the theater.  He ran across the parking lot.  He ran across a grassy field or two.  He didn’t stop all out running until hitting the border of the barracks area and then quick-stepped to his barracks in order to not look too obvious to any casual observer.  He laid in his bunk with his BDU’s and boots still on and pulled the covers up to his chin just as the Drill Sergeant came barreling through the doors for headcount.  

Poor Aaroneous.  A fellow of infinite jest.  Caught in the spider’s web but avoiding the spider.  


***

Korea

Are there Little Boys on Jupiter?

Are there little boys on Jupiter

giggling when you say “poopiter”?

It’s fun to think about it, to 

bounce and fly and shout it.

Where colors mix and swirl 

while spinning in a tilt-a-whirl.

But are there little boys on Jupiter?

Well, I’ve heard things much stupider!

***

Murderer of Murder Hornets

With all of the talk about so-called “murder hornets” on Facebook this past week it didn’t take long for me to recollect that I had a history with these fascinating insects.

I had to rewind to the summer of 1991 to find this pertinent scrap of memory.  I was new to the Army as a young infantryman fresh out of Basic Training and assigned to “Delta Death,” a company  on the north end of Camp Casey, 2^nd Infantry Division, Republic of Korea.  When I arrived to the company area it was eerily quiet as the entire battalion was on its 3 month rotation to live and patrol inside the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Korea.  I was issued my weapon and necessary equipment before being sent north on a bus.

On the DMZ I was assigned a cot in my squad’s tent and then taken to be introduced to the First Sergeant, 1SGT Glasgow.  I was in a tight parade-rest position which seemed to amuse him.  He told me I could take it easy and have a seat.  Things were a bit more relaxed “in the field” as they say in the military, but I had no experience of the Army apart from the insular and high stress world of Basic Training where trainees cowered before the NCO’s, especially around one as high ranking as a First Sergeant.

He asked me some questions about myself and learned I had finished three years of college before dropping out to join the Army at the start of the Gulf War.  He then asked what I knew of the political situation in this part of the world.  I was a History and Political Science major so I gave some history of the region and dropped a few names so that he raised his eyebrows and looked at my escort and guffawed, “That’s the most intelligent thing I’ve heard since we’ve been up here!”   

So what about those murder hornets, you ask.  I’m getting to that part.

While living isolated on the DMZ life was pretty much consumed with training exercises that could run around the clock, depending on which phase you were in.  Much like the quarantine situation now, there was not much to do with your “free time” after work because you were living in a small town of tents surrounded by a high fence crowned with concertina wire in the absolute middle of nowhere known as “Warrior Base.”  It was during one of our field training excursions that I ran into this notorious insect that has so captured our imaginations this past week and spawned a veritable swarm of memes.

I remember being out in the woods somewhere miles from Warrior Base around midday and I had to go #2.  I broke off from the others in my squad and went deeper into the trees to have some privacy.  I pulled out my entrenching tool (a small folding shovel) and started digging a “cat hole” at the base of a tree to do my business.  That’s when I heard what sounded like a stealth helicopter skimming the treetops.  I stopped digging and looked around.  The sound came again, but this time closer.  It buzzed by me so loudly that it produced the doppler effect!  

At first I thought it might be a small bird because it was too big and loud to be an insect.  When it finally landed on a tree and I could see it more clearly I knew there was no way I was dropping my pants anywhere near that thing!  It was either me or him, but one of us had to go (I had to go! stupid murder hornet).  I pulled my knife and circled around the tree where I knew it had landed.  It was remarkably tolerant of me as I ever-so-slowly peered around the tree and lifted my knife.  In a kind of spasm I flicked the blade with my wrist and severed the hornet in two pieces.  That’s how big it was!

I see myself now in a 30 year retrospective: PFC Haney, Murderer of Murder Hornets.

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