We Were Invincible...Right?
This is part one in a seven-part serial that will run every Tuesday and Thursday for the remainder of March. This piece was included in full in our recent collection of spiritual writing, Spiritus Oppidum, Vol. 1.
There was a time long ago when I actually believed that.
As I write this, it’s seven o’clock on the eve of a fine spring day, what my mother used to refer to as a “ham and egger.” I’m long since retired now, and my days are less hectic than they were when I was still in the workforce, but I keep myself busy. For instance, Sundays – like today – I get up at six, have my cup of coffee (part of my mind still yammers ceaselessly for the cigarette that the doctors finally convinced me to give up), then I head out for my walk. I used to do five miles back when I still had all my hair. It dropped to three after the mini-stroke years back. These days I’m down to one. But one’s better than none…right?
I go down to the fire station and back, and the round trip is, according to my Fitbit, a little more than a mile. My town’s sole convenience store, Jerry’s Jeneral, is about halfway between the station and my house, and on my way back I stop in and grab the day’s paper. Usually there’s a couple guys sitting outside at one of the picnic tables they’ve got set up out front. They’re about my age – one foot in the grave – and I’ll usually shoot the shit with them for a few minutes before continuing on my way. Willy and Bruce, they are. Willy, a jolly mountain of a man who smokes the shittiest-smelling cigars I’ve ever had the misfortune of being around, can hold a pleasant, neutral conversation. Bruce, on the other hand, is a veteran of Korea and possessed of the astounding ability to bring every topic of conversation, no matter how prosaic, back around to how the world is going down the shitter thanks to the “slants and kikes”. I nod in all the appropriate places and throw in an oh, yeah or a tell me about it here and there, listening for the absolute minimum amount of time politeness will allow before I move on. I know Willy likes me, but I get the feeling that if Bruce knew I was half “kike” myself, he wouldn’t piss down my throat if my guts were on fire. Not that it bothers me; every man, especially a decrepit old naysayer tottering through his twilight years after risking his life serving our country, is entitled to his opinion. No matter how wrong it is.
Back home, I open up my Pill Minder, one of those clear plastic things with different compartments for each day of the week. I take whatever pills are in that day’s compartment (Sundays there are five – two white ones, two green ones, and one lone pinkish one), nuke a bowl of Quaker Instant Peaches ‘n Cream Oatmeal, and make my way through the paper. Takes me a while, sometimes; the glasses I’ve worn since I was thirty-five or so have lenses that make the bottom of a fishbowl look as thin and delicate as the rind of ice one would find in a November mud puddle by comparison. Even still, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear the goddamn print was getting smaller. But it isn’t, it’s just me…right?
Hell, I’m old.
Pills taken, oatmeal down the hatch, and paper read, I then get about the day’s business. Years ago, “the day’s business” was a whirlwind of activity as you’ll see, but it now consists of little more than tending to Samson and Delilah, the sometimes-foul-tempered cats I took in off the street last year, puttering in my garden, watching game shows (Drew Carey? Bob Barker he ain’t), and that perennial favorite of fossils like myself – napping.
Today, though, none of that stuff happened. Today’s business was different.
This morning’s below-the-fold headline took my breath away, in every sense of the phrase. Watching me as I read it, a deaf observer would have thought I’d been gut-punched by an invisible fist. After, there was no playing with the cats, no gardening, no Price is Right, not even any napping. I read the article three times, after which I tried to stand up. On the third attempt I was able to gain my feet, and commenced shambling aimlessly through the house on legs that felt like sawmill slats. It was fifteen minutes or so later when I finally found my way to my grandfather’s sideboard, where I keep things I’ve collected over the course of my life that are important to me. Digging through the mess of birthday cards from my nieces and nephews, winning scratch tickets I neglected to cash (one of them was for two hundred bucks!), the Roger Maris-signed baseball my Uncle Reggie gave me for my fourteenth birthday, and myriads of other things, I found the three things I was looking for. Gathering them up, I went into my study, sat down, and just stared, transfixed by the view of my neighbor’s oak tree and chicken coop, for God knows how long. When I came out of that – what? Daze? Trance? – I began to write what you now read, and I will continue to write until the story is told and my conscience is clear.