| Friends, ghosts, and visits with what might have been and possibilites come and gone... |
[Dec. 17th, 2009|05:36 pm] |
Dulce et Decorum est…I thought I saw the ghost of Tom Strickland, today. A customer, tall and wiry, walked by me with a child riding on his shoulders. His stride was long, and as he quickly passed by, I thought of a hiker’s gait, one used to uphill climbs. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the blur, and did a double-take. Tom? I knew it wasn’t you, but…
On a day like today, with grey skies, and a melancholy overcast to everything, I let my age creep upon me, filling me with a sadness and dejection that Coleridge might have described as “a grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear…A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, which finds no natural outlet, no relief, in word, or sigh, or tear.” And as I moved through crowds of shoppers and mall-loitering kids, I was overcome with how ephemeral, fleeting and temporary our lives are, pursuing this and that, frantically moving to and fro from one thing to the other, as if we might awaken from a dream if we stopped moving…
Everywhere I turned, I saw the youth of today, in the middle of their teens, preening and posing, being the teenagers that they are. How young they seemed, and when I helped a young man obviously fresh out of Army Basic Training, it struck me that nineteen years old, just a few years older than those kids in their slovenly, yet cosmetically cool clothes, seemed so young...too young to be asked to die for their country. With that on my mind, it is only natural that a latent image of Tom, now colored more by imagination than memory, would come striding by, tall and lanky, with a child straddled across his shoulders.
Later, a hand rested on my shoulder, and I heard a gruff voice say, “What’s the Third Article of the United States Marine Corps Code of Conduct?” Which stiffened my spine, brought up another quagmire of memories, and gave me that sinking feeling in my gut. It was almost as if the ghost of some Drill Instructor that once tormented me had discovered where I had been hiding all these years…I fought down the urge to stand at attention.
I turned around, and to my surprise, looking hard and ready “to get some,” stood a former employee, now a newly forged Marine Private First Class. He was once a good kid on the verge of manhood, now, after his rites of passage, could claim that title and more. Now on leave, he was visiting home and his girlfriend-soon-to-be-wife, eating his favorite foods, seeing his favorite places, and trying to make sense of civilians. We talked and laughed, but, there was something different between us, and we both knew it. And without resentment, I can honestly say that I respect that.
What makes a soldier? What makes a warrior? And in the pursuit of those titles and ways of life, can one ever recover a sense of honor, rebuild their shattered psyche and persona and live a fulfilling life, knowing that they failed to live up to those ideals? I don’t know. But, whatever it does take, I am content to know that there are those that can take on those mantles, become more than they are, and succeed where I had once failed. |
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