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Edited on Sun Dec-24-06 11:02 PM by wjmj
A sweet post to say hello to a fine arrangement of intellects and intelligence. Hey. I'll read much, reply a little, and strike on with life entering my late fifties. I've much to reflect upon this Christmas eve, home alone intentionally.
-I've two brothers, an older and younger, and four sisters, one older, two younger, still living. My father, turning 85 this year, lives in his home state of Alabama. My mother, Julene, born and buried there, died in 1974; my youngest sister, Christina, born in North Carolina, lies next to her. I mention their names that I can name unconditional love. Their having given it unbeknownst to me till their passing, put a void in my heart that lingers fully nourished to this day. I have my life been protected by their love, nurtured and given to know my world because of it. Bless their roller derby hearts. Chrissy died a year after Momma, I swear, of a broken Downs-heart. These redneck women were love.
In September of 1967 I graduated for the second time that year, from Marine Corps boot camp, Parrish Island, South Carolina. A couple of Septembers later, I endured some bad-bad things, the biggest of which continues. I volunteered to fight, a poor white boy from eastern North Carolina believing in his country. To this day, though, this old boy endures the most talented lie ever uttered by humankind—patriotism.
By comparison, consider a lesser talented lie I’ve known, that surfers were commie-pinko-faggots ruining everything for decent folk like us. As life went on, I never met a collectively happier bunch of folk, and, of late, I’ve begun including rock climbers among those possessing accomplished inner selves. A great divide, only a lie can impose, kept me from these truths. A rooted lie, well fed and admired it seems to me, talented like a cockroach. In Viet Nam, bomber-grade cockroaches could fly. I admired that.
Come Christmas 1968, alone in Bar Harbor, Washington on its Eve, enduring an apparently unseasonably snowy, cold, wintry day, I called home. Eastern North Carolina lay thousands of miles away back when everyone huddled by the only telephone for an expensive long distance call. By then my oldest brother had run away eight years, and my older sister was married living in Philadelphia. Chrissy learned to spell her name that year and I was as happy for her as I’d ever been happy in my life. The next year, before going over, she’d helicopter-body-slam me much to my absolute surprise.
The coming of the bus back to the base, snow and wind delayed, stretched into a lengthy wait by a lamppole in dress greens and Marine Corps overcoat, no match for the merciless night’s forces of nature. In my mind, though, was a match, my phone call home. No easy matter, was it, that long distance connection to my home and hearth. I timed it to match supper and baths, and the evening news. Come my hanging up and going under the street lamp, the evening news in Bar Harbor had long passed and Christmas Eve had become Christmas morn in North Carolina.
This time of year falsehoods of the magnitude of patriotism suffer me to need solitude and its silence that I might behold my humanity. I propose that Human Good is indefatigable how ever much it suffers patriotism and fundamentalism, though being inexorably punished by glory and sin. Inescapably it seems fair to say, into hearts and souls, glory and sin dig deep. We all know it. I couldn’t escape being warned about surfers and hippies, or how evil and dangerous was New York City; where I grew up, being other-than-WASP prospered severe penalty borne in trench-riddled hearts and souls. White Power. I could’ve been a contender it its army but for a voice unknown, albeit well known to me.
Before my oldest sister married, she worked in Washington, DC; because of this, the day before Dr. King delivered his Dream speech, I stood at his podium. The day before Dr. King was murdered, I left Memphis for home, having the winter before spent my first Christmas in the Marines in Alabama with my older brother, the last time I’ve been in his home. It was cold that year too, my first in a Marine Corps overcoat. It kept me warm. That Christmas I gave my sister-in-law a bottle of Chanel No. 5 by proxy, having handily won the poker game only to buy, for my brother with my winnings, a forgotten gift.
April of 1967, I volunteered. I made no demands of which or what, or if, and I rode to the bus station with my father on the 5th of July, got on one and never looked back. I did what I was told, tried to excel where I could, did, and came home to tell about it. In Bar Harbor that frigid night in ‘68, I gained the furthest reach my imagination had ever achieved. I gave my operator no easy task. Well, the weather surely played a significant role, but 3000 miles of landscape looming in my mind determined all, and still does, although it’s since stretched to 12000 miles.
I don’t know her name, my long distance operator; still, she remains a popular piece of my landscape. That Christmas Eve I imagined her in the big city south of Whidbey Island, Seattle, suffering then a snowstorm, apparently an unusual thing to have happen there. Through the evening she kept me aware of her efforts on my behalf, routing me through Salt Lake City only to die in Dallas, so then through Oakland to bog down on hold in Cincinnati. Every moment of waiting and knowing, and waiting and not knowing but wondering, I listened to my operator while she busied with the switching of me through so many distant homes and hearths. As she labored and reported, my imagination intensified.
Afterwards, by the corner pole, I slowly reeled in the distance between me and my home and hearth. So, till the base bus arrived, I wasn’t beside a pole besieged by a bitter winter, I was home. I needed only a glance here and there of Christmas lights twinkling in a window, or from lamppost decorations, to be there. Confined to my imagination, I was home, the hearth I stood by surrounded with family. My long distance operator did that for me. When she and I began—sun still up, winds mild—traffic along the road didn’t distract this lonely Marine far away from home housed in a phone booth. Surely I didn’t tell her I was a lonely Marine. Surely not. Calling 3000 miles made me far from home, but I just as easily could’ve been a bum to her; I'm so sure of that. There was something unconditional in my operator’s voice, known but unknown. I often hear it in surfers and rock climbers, and such. I listen for it in everyone crossing my landscape.
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