(and a mouse)

I was sitting on a beach in Bimini yesterday, alone on the whole beach, and taking in the gorgeous sky of scenery before me.  A brown pelican drifted indifferently into the picture, riding a wide light breeze.  I watched him closely as he inched across my field of vision, left to right, and just offshore.    

He seemed entirely unaware of the comic elegance of his deportment. 

Further, something about him evinced an astonishing disregard for the beauty of the moment: the varied bands of teal painting the ocean, the rhythmic vibration of waves breaking white and fussing upon the long languid stretch of sand, and the gift of lift above it all. Above him, messy tatters of cotton candy whites moved at the slow direction of the wind.

A sudden sharp dive.  As if he’d fallen off a shelf and was himself surprised to be crashing headfirst into the ocean.   

Now he sat, bobbing contentedly in the slow roll, and I could see the weight of a small fish laying in the soft hammock-sag of his gullet. The pelican floated, not yet throwing back his head to swallow, masterfully indifferent even to this event. And, though mere yards from me, his glance at me was as absent as the look a teenager gives when taking your movie ticket.

Conversely, he now had my full attention.

Why wasn’t he eating the fish? Not hungry? After all that plunging spectacle? I wondered if he was Jedi-trained in being satisfied, and appearing bored was just a routine disguise, an exercise in contentment that he’d perfected. Finally, and, I’m telling you, reluctantly, he threw his head back and gobbled the fish. For a moment I saw a flash of silver wink from his long goofy bill.

He lifted and flapped his big brown body off into the fame of this blogpost, and history, with all the clumsy grace of an early flight experiment.      

I pondered his scheme of delay in eating the fish. You know this kind of moment―when I was a teenager, I’d delay getting out of bed on a Saturday morning. After rousing slightly, eyes still closed, you let out a little sigh, stretch deep into the sheets, and push hard into rest while it quietly packs its things and prepares to depart. You are so, so satisfied with the moment, and you want it to last. The pelican appears to live in that moment.

How?

Now, on to the mouse.    

Robert Burns’ poem “To a Mouse On Turning Up Her Nest With A Plough” gives us the phrase ‘the best laid plans of mice and men’ which speaks to how everything can go to shit suddenly. 

It is first about a farmer (the narrator in the poem) apologizing to a mouse after the farmer wrecked the mouse’s nest accidentally while plowing a field. Since it is almost winter, the farmer knows that the destruction of the mouse’s home is especially calamitous.

The farmer then ‘tells’ the mouse that such things happen in the world of humans too, so that ‘the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry’. Hence, we have the iconic phrase.

This is a moment of tender empathy and similarity. It is followed, however, by a dissimilarity:  the farmer finally telling the mouse that, despite both being subject to misfortune, she is lucky, or even ‘blessed’, to be a mouse and not a man, since a mouse lives only in the world of present dangers, while man not only worries in the present but also remembers the grim elements of the past and fears the future. 

Written in 1785, this poem is timeless stuff.

Is there a pelican or a mouse anywhere that is torturing themselves daily with regret over decisions they’ve made in their lives?  Is there a mouse or a pelican anywhere that fears war and all of the consequent humanitarian disaster? 

I guess not.

As far as I know, that pelican thinks yesterday will last forever.  Bathing in sunlight upon a kiwi-fresh breeze, floating in paradise, dropping onto a tasty fish once in awhile, bobbing onto the moment at time’s gentle swell, throwing the odd haughty glance about. 

Meanwhile, I’m on the beach, scribbling down these thoughts, in this same paradise, torturing myself with thoughts of my past, my present life, and the beginnings of World War III, already underway in the Ukraine.

Oh!  To be a pelican in paradise.     

This is the first of a projected 6,000-episode series . . .

The Past, the Present, and the Future walk into a room. Things were tense.

(crazy . . . 2: unable to think in a clear or sensible way)

Let’s start the New Year off with something crazy!

First, all the normal defenses don’t seem to work very well nowadays against crazy. Secondly, the crazies gain validation from any silence on your part when they make their declarations in conversation. (Note the Catch 22). And thirdly, crazies have suddenly presented as tons of people you know that you’d never have guessed were crazy.

Defenses. Normal defenses against crazy have always been experience, research, whatever logic and reason can be applied to such, education overall . . . etc. We’ve come a long way since we dropped from the trees, and, as a society, we’ve come to (rightfully) value and exploit this knowledge as we evolve. But, for the last couple of years, these defenses have been limping through space like a Starship that’s been hit with photon torpedoes. Scotty is desperately trying to get more power, and people are darting about the bridge trying to get the shields against crazy back up.

Silence. When people say crazy things in normal conversation, and you’re standing right there, it is easy and even desirable to say nothing; the crazy thing gets left hanging in the air. Or even supported. People don’t want to be confrontational as a general rule, and nobody wants to start a big thing. (I distinguish this situation of course from discussions that occur in the social media dog-park.) And, boy, there is a new discomfort being inducted into the Dictionary Of Feeling this year, and that is when someone says the crazy thing out loud about vaccination/pandemic, or Trumpism stuff. So, when I remain silent, as usually happens, I can see that validation of some color happens on the other end and I feel the discomfort of not correcting the statement. My discomfort stems from the forced choice of either being confrontational or, via an act of omission, affirmational. And the latter contributes to the momentum of something untrue and possibly dangerous to all.

You?! There is an elephant in the room. And it is an elephant. (That might be the wittiest thing I’ve ever said.) I’m referring to, of course, the linkage between politics and medicine in this case. There is one particular political party that has gone tits-up on reason here; I won’t say which, but a careful rereading of the beginning of this paragraph might help. (By the way, did you know that Democrats don’t believe in hand surgery now? And the Green Party thinks CAT Scans are all a bullshit hoax perpetrated by Big Tech?) And here’s the thing, the numbers involved are huge (millions of people have entered the utterly-unsupportable-belief-system zone) and the crazy goes well beyond all the reasoning shitstorms over the pandemic itself―it now also extends to theories about voting, immigration, economics, racism, democracy and insurrection. I’m sure I’ve missed a few. And people say things and I walk by it and think “You?!” And I always also think about how these people, who pass for normal in polite society, can waltz past the ‘secrets’ test: For example, think about all the people from all walks of life that would have to be involved in massive voter fraud, vaccination ‘tracking’, Coronavirus death-count inflation etc. . . and then wonder how it’s all able to be kept so secret, so out of range of being able to be proven, legally or otherwise, despite the most contortionist efforts of an elephant and its deluded following. Put a pin in that. Now, swear your girlfriend to secrecy and tell her that Frank is cheating on Gina, and see how long that secret lasts.

Examples. Despite all the possible collision fronts, my two fun examples below both involve the pandemic since they were the most recent, but I’ve heard all the other stuff by now too:

FUN EXAMPLE #1. Recently. I was doing some gardening with an acquaintance of mine, someone who is really a delightful person, and vaccination came up. I mentioned that I was fully vaccinated and she said she was holding off. She said she believed there might be tracking devices in there, and she didn’t really trust the government. Wow. I asked how this could be possible, practically, as in “Wow, wouldn’t that be really expensive, and how would they ensure only one tracking device got sucked up into the syringe for each shot?” (We’ve seen how multiple shots get drawn consecutively out of each vaccine bottle.) I said that immediately―of the million refutations at hand―and I don’t know why I picked that one out of the hat. I didn’t flash on any experience, any research on the issue, or yet apply a logic structure to the premise, or reason any deductions or inductions from it all. I just blurted this out because it was so easy and I was still not completely sure that she was being serious. But she was, and therefore the conversation quietly petered out. We gardened a little more, happy and well. Afterwards, I let the shock sink in. What the Duck? My questions were stones skipping off the surface of her water and I even detected a slight concern on her face that I might not be in-the-know.

FUN EXAMPLE #2 Very recently. I’m walking by a table with perhaps ten people and there were several nice, somewhat lighthearted conversations going on. I’d previously heard “The virus is just another cold” here and today, one of the more talkative among them -a different guy- declared that he wasn’t vaccinated because he didn’t want to be ‘tracked’. I just found myself saying casually “You really think you’re that important?” . . . A few people laughed and he didn’t seem offended and he continued “No, really, the government is tracking us.”. . . and here came his big punch-line . . . ” and we let them!” Said with gravity, and now everyone was watching us. You’d have to have been there to see, but there was still a joking atmosphere. And so I stopped walking and said: “Oh, really? They’re tracking you? There’s a bunch of people behind computer terminals watching you? (I asked his name) OK, (pretending I’m watching a computer screen now) Attention Everybody! I’ve got eyes on Rick! He’s going into a 7-11 now! If he gets another fucking Slurpee, I want drones in the air! That guy is going down!” Everyone laughed and it died down and I took a seat and we talked about other things. And he seemed like a pretty nice guy. This pleasant dissipation of tension was welcome, but I know it’s rare, and that guy really believes his stuff. I don’t think I turned him around on the issue with my own little verbal drone strike. He’s walking around out there somewhere, and as far as I know he has a legal right to vote.

So, how do we handle this? I don’t know. I do know that there is a major train of thought out there, posited by well-meaning people on T.V., that the best way to engage with this strain of crazy is to be deferential to the other opinion, acknowledge their belief systems and maybe gently try to find common ground while nibbling at the edges of the issue, and all the rest. Bullshit. Someone has to stand for something eventually, and I’m going to go with the tried and true science-and-reason thing. It seemed to be working just fine before that famous ride down the escalator.

If I’ve offended you, please note at least that I am addressing the second Merriam-Webster ‘essential’ definition of crazy in this post, and not the first, and for a reason: I’d like to believe that we’re moving through a temporary phase of a muddling of the sensibilities under the duress of some novel political (think elephant) and social (think Facebook/Podcasts) pressures and we’ll recover soon. We’ll get the smelling salts out soon enough and everything will be all right. (But really, I just don’t want my house to get fire-bombed.)

What is the real solution here? I still don’t know. “I don’t trust the sources” has become the mantra of those who would argue against science and reason in the same way that “You just have to have faith” is the mantra of the religious. Politics is a new religion for those who no longer require facts to construct their belief systems. And there is not much of a success rate with deprogramming religious people.

I feel like I keep stumbling upon victims of some kind of bizarre attack. I am reminded of a moment in Army Training:

I was sitting in bleachers with my Ranger platoon receiving training in chemical warfare. An instructor yelled out the following question: “What is the proper application of antidote if you come upon someone on the battlefield convulsing in the throes of a Russian VX Nerve Agent attack?!”

Staff Sergeant Edgar raised his hand and calmly said: “An intramuscular injection of lead via the M1911A1 syringe.”

Crazy.

I lost my wireless earbuds, having last handled them on Christmas Eve. 

I had long lusted after wireless earbuds (sports/over-the-ear) that I could jog or hike with but the price was way too high given how reasonably satisfied I’d been for years with the ‘wired’ ones. . . which I consider a miracle. Oh, yes, I’ve been on this long journey from the Walkman (1979) onwards―and it’s been amazing. So, I’ve learned to manage the wire pretty well even while running trails or whatever. But I hadn’t priced the wireless ones in years and when I found out recently that I could get some nice ones for only $39, I was shocked. The over-the-ear sports kind―that price had come way down! I went for it, and they work great. I’ll never go back to being a miserable little penny-pinching freak with loser ‘wired’ earbuds.

But, I lost them already, after just about a month. 

I knew I had them Christmas Eve because I used them while working out at Planet Fitness that morning and believed they most likely got lost when I was juggling a bunch of stuff from my car to house when I got back mid-morning.  Bringing stuff back and forth is always a shitshow with me for some reason.  And I knew I’d temporarily set some stuff down on the street during the shuffle.   I checked the car, the street, traced my paths, etc. and turned my place inside out over the course of Christmas and the day after.  Nothing.  So, I finally called Planet Fitness:

ME:        “Yeah, hello, I wonder if you have a Lost & Found? . . . and whether you could check to see if a case of wireless earbuds turned up?  (asked for description) . . . they’re in a small black case, the shape of an egg and actually the size of a very large egg.  If anything, they were left the morning of the 24^th . . . Christmas Eve morning.  The brand name I think is JLab or something. . .”

HER:      “Hmmm. . . (rustle of paper) . . .there’s nothing in the log about it, so, . . No.”

ME:        “Oh, ok, but I was just wondering if you could check anyways?. . . a small black. . .”

HER:      “Yeah, No, there’s nothing in the log about it.”

I could feel my blood pressure checking in for the ride.  Nothing to get worried about yet Sir, just want to be standing by in case we have to go hot.

ME:         “Yes, ok, but do you have access to look to actually see if they’re there?  I just want to know if they might be in the place where you keep the stuff . . . I know about the log, the only question I have is if you have access to look?”

Some of my thoughts began to yell at me and I had to put them in a time-out.

HER:      “Look, I’ve answered your question, there’s nothing written, there’s nothing in the log about it.”

My blood pressure began to yell “fix bayonets!” all up and down the line. I wondered:

 a.)  if there were nuclear access code procedures involved which prevented her from opening the Lost & Found vault―which might contain, at best, a dented pair of reading glasses, a stale pack of gum, a terrycloth sweat-rag, and possibly an earbud case or,

 b.) did she simply not want to walk over and look in that fucking drawer or box or whatever? 

ME:  “Look, I understand there is nothing written about it, but, there’s a place where you keep the Lost & Found stuff, right?  Can you just look and see, that’s all I’m saying!” . . .

And alas, at that moment, the little brass gears that engage my mental capacity to tolerate this kind of stuff began to slip, being so worn from heavy use over the years.  And that slippage caused me to finish with:

ME:  “And please don’t tell me about the log again!” 

HER:  (curtly) “Sir, I’ve answered your question, it is not in the log, and your attitude is disrespectful.  I’m hanging up now.”

And she hung up.

Oh.  Well. 

I had the Planet Fitness business card which had the email address of the manager and so later that night I emailed the manager, explaining what had happened. My email had no vitriol, however.  My energy had dissipated, I wasn’t convinced the case was going to turn up there anyway, and I simply asked the manager if they did indeed have a Lost & Found and could she just take a peek.

Happily, the manager emailed back the next day, (today), and said indeed the earbuds case was there and they’d hold them for me!

Wow.

I just now picked them up.   Awesome! A big Thank You to whoever turned them in!

When I got there, I could tell instantly that the woman at the desk was the same woman I’d talked to on the phone a couple days before―by both her voice and demeanor.  As soon as I said my name, she knew what I was there for and asked her co-worker to have me sign for them in the logbook and then she walked off.

The co-worker flipped open the famous logbook, and I had to initial a block saying I’d received the item back. 

And the place where I had to initial/sign was right next to where I could see that a full, accurate, and contemporaneous entry of my earbud case being found had been made on the morning of Christmas Eve, at a time shortly after I left the gym.

Dr. Deborah Birx’s email revelations of today show that, at worst, she was criminally timid in representing the mandates of her profession or, at best, is running with a loyalty ethos that prioritizes loyalty to the person above loyalty to the mission. Neither scenario covers her in glory, but I suspect she was caught up in trying to be loyal to the person, although she might reframe it as her being loyal to ‘the position’ of the office of the President. Loyalty in the workplace is a siren song; there is an alluring pride both in having loyal employees and, in some ways more so, in being seen as loyal to your own boss. (Or to the mission―we’ll get there).

Birx didn’t agree with the Trump Team’s medical plan to push ‘herd immunity’ as the way forward through the Pandemic and so sought a way to not participate in a Trump-endorsed medical conference wherein a focus would be the advocacy of herd-immunity strategies that she believed were scientifically unsound and very dangerous to the U.S. population. She was at the time, notably, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator and was of course presumed to attend. But her decision to evade the conference and give ‘cover’ to the White House to account for her absence speaks to something that may seem surprising: she thought she was expressing loyalty to the President by not frustrating his intentions, and, worse, she didn’t then perceive the dishonor in that expression of loyalty. And that dynamic, that specific blind-spot of feeling, is ‘workplace cultural’ and is where ships crash into rocks.

Birx’s actions should have been informed by her Hippocratic Oath as a Doctor, her Oath of Office as an Army Colonel, and whatever further declarations of duty attended her ascension to the position of White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator. The Hippocratic Oath states in part: “I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine” and the Oath of Office for an Army Officer states in part: “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic“. I doubt any induction to her Coronavirus Response Coordinator position deviated materially from these basic premises. Nowhere would it say that ensuring the psychological comfort of the boss is the priority—regardless of the mission or circumstances.

I believe Birx’s actions were informed by something other than her oaths: the nebulous but strong and prevalent workplace culture of ‘supporting the Boss’ or ‘supporting the Commander’.

I’ve dealt with this for decades in the military, and from early on, I’ve always factored in loyalty towards the mission versus loyalty to the Commander specifically. (I acknowledge that in theory they are supposed to be aligned.) As the stakes increase, I find myself factoring in the mission even more. This is dangerous stuff in the Army Officer world and has sometimes inured tangibly to my detriment; I’ve been hurt by this and feel sufficient standing to opine. Perhaps my tack is nebulous as well, but it doesn’t violate any oaths and no mission has suffered by my snuggling up to the justification of ‘being loyal to the Boss’. Though I’ve certainly had some allies along the way, I found that my peers were generally uncomfortable with the subject of supporting the mission versus the Commander and default to the prevailing culture of wanting to show that they’re supporting the Commander.

Proof of Birx’s entanglement in this culture is her candid admission to her peers about what she was doing and why. If she felt any shame or dishonor, that email being dissected in the news today would never have happened. Perhaps she was aware also that she’d even engender some respect from her peers over her martyrdom towards engineering a way to not counter her boss. And now look how far we’ve strayed from the mission of advocating science in service to saving lives during a national emergency.

Birx no doubt thinks she was ‘respecting and protecting the position of the President of the United States. And I really mean ‘no doubt’―I’ve seen this too many times and every time someone is called on this they talk about respecting the position “even if I don’t like the person”. Some even expect, as a result of this declaration, to be respected for their magnanimity in this regard! Certainly, Birx didn’t like Trump (how could any real scientist?) and was aware of his flaws as a human, let alone a leader. But this is missing the point; the mission of coordinating the Coronavirus response in the United States should trump Trump’s personality traits -be they good or bad- and following that mission’s North Star would have had her in that conference advocating scientifically and ethically sound courses of action while refuting scientifically and ethically unsound courses of action.

The ‘respecting the position’ argument deflates further when one thinks about the workplace environment with granularity. It is not the position, but the person, that one encounters at meetings, and in the halls, and it is the person one communicates with―it is not the position. For Birx, it would be Trump saying nice things about her or not, inviting her to meetings or not, enhancing her career or not. It would not be the abstract concept of a position that does these things for her or to her.

A final argument that some give in these situations is that they must behave so in order to remain on scene (versus resigning in protest) to prevent things from getting even worse. This color of hubris tries to believe that their special brand of expertise is more valuable than sending a message, with either candid argument or resignation, that the mission is at risk. Besides being ultimately a disservice to the boss, and by extension the mission, this argument smacks of cowardice. And we’ll never know how things could have turned out better had everyone involved had the spine to recalibrate their loyalty off of flawed humans and towards the actual job mission.

What’s the fix? We could start by devaluing the notion of automatic loyalty to people of position. And we could consider in advance exactly where we would willingly subordinate our own need to be seen as loyal to the boss in order to prioritize the larger needs of mission accomplishment. It’s a tough sell, I know ―everybody wants to be seen as a good little boy or girl.

How will you know when you are at that crossroads? You’ll know. And then remember that you have a choice that might be different than the one you’ve been trained to feel.

I can’t believe I got through this without mentioning bleach.

Whoops.

I dropped my brother off to do some grocery shopping and asked him what he was going to get.  He said he’d poke around and figure it out.  Reckless!  Or, at least as reckless as he gets nowadays.  As he was getting out of the car, a friend motored up to my car window in his wheelchair and we talked briefly about the recent operation on his arm, my sister’s boyfriend’s recent death, the ravages of addiction, the shitty cold winter weather, and other pleasantries.   As he was leaving, I told him that he always keeps it interesting, and we laughed.  And so I was carelessly amused inside for a moment, and shifted into drive.   The sun was working its way through the gray overcast clouds and so the Lord giveth and he taketh away. 

But isn’t it all really a process of taking?  Taking my brother’s recklessness, my friend’s legs, my sister’s partner, the ‘party’ life?  

Or is it a giving?—the adventures that my brother indeed had, my friend’s High School hockey career, the good 16 years that my sister had with her partner before he OD’ed, the current clarity and strength of my friend’s sobriety and mine?

Time gives and takes, and we end up at the bottom, having fallen down stairs to where we suddenly lay in a heap of age to assess the treasures and trinkets and tatters at our feet.  It is not a giving, or a taking—but a falling, a falling through events, and time can only add to the difficult experiences, it cannot subtract. The occurrence of difficulty and remembrance of despair is cumulative but rarely dissipates, even in the face of subsequent cheer.  It is the coffee stain on that white couch, and we must all drink coffee on that couch every day.  It is the essence of a day, and, though spills are not wanted, nor generally expected, the stains happen and begin to color all things. 

I took my foot off of the brake.  I was thinking of all of this as I was driving away from the grocery store, turning it over in my mind like a coin I was inspecting carefully to see if it is real. 

OK.

So, I thought I’d swing by the place where I grew up to see if anyone was outside.  Thus, the ritual continues.  Ever since I returned home a couple of years ago, after being gone for 33 years, I’d take the merest excuse while driving to swing through the housing project where I grew up and see if anyone was hanging around outside my old place, or arriving or leaving.  The idea is that I’ll offer twenty or forty dollars to tour the inside for just a few minutes.  I want to see how small it all is, to imagine the picnic table in the kitchen where we all ate, all nine of us, and to see the few bedrooms and imagine the bunkbeds, the bureaus, the shoes everywhere, the toys, and the clothes.  I wanted to remember the single bathroom, the window out onto the small roof from where we’d jump into the yard, just clearing the fence, as a rite of passage when we grew brave enough. 

Oddly, though the place was obviously inhabited, there was never anyone there I could approach. There are always toys strewn about the yard, cars in the parking lot, and even lights on sometimes, but I didn’t want to knock. It’s not part of the deal. When I actually see someone outside, I’ll approach harmlessly and with great deference, making the money reward more substantial at the merest balk, and assuring whomever that the place couldn’t be any more chaotic than when I served years zero through eighteen there. These are my terms, it had to be this way, and I was always prepared to wait. The waiting didn’t seem to bother me, and only increased the value of the tour for the day it would happen.

But I didn’t expect to wait years—and it’s been years.  And, believe me, I drive through there once or twice a week.  I thought I’d catch someone there in the first few weeks, or maybe months at the most.  But, time after time, the duplex apartment just stood there with nobody around, and I’d stare at the bricks as I drove by.  Adjacent apartments would occasionally feature people outside, but not mine. 

So one day, I pulled over and waited.  I stared at the cement back step where all us kids would occasionally be treated to pizza on a hot summer night, or we’d play jacks there or wait for the ice-cream truck there. I wondered if the new people there, the children, hung out on that back step too.  After a few moments I left, embarrassed.  I was cutting into the dignity of the mission by lurking. 

But I did it again a few more times, I hung there, just to force someone to arrive or leave.  I watched the yard and saw us all out there with a water hose in the searing summer heat, or playing board games on a blanket, or playing breathless tag games in the fall, or making enormous snow forts during the blizzards.  Always, I left after a moment, having caught myself cheating again.

Goddamn, what are the odds that my driving by has never caught anyone there?  The math is unbelievable.

So, after dropping my brother off and talking to my friend, I wound my way through the inner city, over the railroad tracks and up the road adjacent to the old place and, yet again, pulled over.

There was a woman sitting on the back step. 

Clearly, it was the mom.  Just the right amount of confidence, wariness, weariness, haggard and yet ready to laugh, hug a kid or shoo someone off her little patch of dirty grass all at the same time.  I know that look. 

She was smoking a cigarette.    

I began to organize the trash on the floor of my car, and put everything into a big brown paper bag.  Then I stood the bag up neatly, banging out a few dents. I looked up and she was still there.  She was looking at me and I looked back.  She didn’t recognize me from the neighborhood and I felt a protective flicker behind her eyes.  I tried to look innocuous, and concentrated on the radio dials in my car for a moment.

Then I drove away.

She followed me with her eyes, and then got back to her life.

And, at last, I got back to mine.     

There is a quiet strength in old rusting machines, a beauty even.  You will find this everywhere just as soon as you begin to look.  Take a look! 

The majesty of all things railroad shelters many an example―here behind the abandoned station hearkens a big respectable gentleman, out of service, but thinking quietly all along like a horse in a stall after the last tender has left the barn and turned out the last light. He is resting gently upon this short stretch of rusted track. The horse is lost in thought and, year by year, rain by sun, snow by cold, night by day, is hurtling through the landscapes of his life and is satisfied. He has taken excited families on vacation, soldiers to war, and people to work―but has a special fondness for the children who were so happy to ride his big iron back to adventure. He can still feel their little pink faces pressed against the windows of his mind. The rust drops upon him in soft brown flakes like a shawl.

There is a quiet strength in old rusting machines, a grandfather strength, an old dog strength. 

Rust gathers in great numbers to meet in a car junkyard. It is the veteran’s center, where cards are played on Saturday mornings and all the old men trade barbs about their service. Everyone is here, equal in rank at last―the pickup trucks, sedans, hotrods, the practical and the flashy, all made proud in their dented rusted glory. Some are here accidentally, some are here just because the heart grew tired at last, and all are eager to share the stories of their dents and worn tires to anyone who will listen. Listen! The trip up the entire west coast! romance in the back seat! to the hospital for the baby! all the errands about town-my God! kids off to college! and, of course, there were always the long hot drives because there was nothing else to do, life is hard, and sometimes people need a song and a breeze to dream.

There is a quiet strength in old rusting machines, a growing strength, a dying strength, a knowing strength.

Antique warehouses collect rust in the everyday elegance of the past. You can feel the generations reach out and touch your hand as you ponder an item and whether it has a place in your life. Can you feel it? Feel! Imagine the thoughtful woman at that antique sewing machine, when new in its day―she is making and fixing the clothes for her family deep into the night, the gaslight soft across the room, draping her husband and children in love that came from her own hands, a foot pedal, a spinning bob, and the warm threads of labor that connected her to their very bodies when they left the house for the day. And over there, the old bicycles and sleds―rusted just so. Oh―the history, the play, the little bells, the laughter, breath, life, wheels, snow, speed, cold, tumble and sky of memories that will not die.

A rusted machine is a servant to the tumble of life and time.

I’ll leave you with the charm of an old rusting tractor, standing handsome in a meadow, remembering it’s long hot days in the field, feet deep in the earth, working under the spring sun and gaining strength, furrow by furrow, from the promise of the thick green flesh of life all around.

Among a few really good friends in Afghanistan, I had a particularly interesting and colorful friend who was in the Navy at the time. Navy?! In a landlocked country? Don’t draw that Editorial Page cartoon just yet―it was actually a good move by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to help with manpower. It was becoming important to lengthen the time between deployments for Soldiers who were being sent on too many rotations to reasonably sustain a family life.  This Navy piece was feasible since so many in the military are in professions that cross over to any big military endeavor: medical, administrative, logistics, etc.

This guy worked in my Operations cell and was a First Lieutenant at the time while I was a Major but, really, we were equals in our dedication to the cause and the smarts and energy we were willing and able to devote to it. Also, we were just outright friends, sincerely, and got along really, really well.

Not that it mattered, but I found out early on that he was quite a blue-blood.  He had an historically recognizable last name.  He told me about it. His Ivy-league grandfather was a Cabinet-level multi-Presidential advisor and a huge player in most of the big decisions of World War II and beyond.  Grandfather eventually became chairman of the World Bank, Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, Chairman of the Ford Foundation, and more―Jesus Christ!  Slow down, Mister Grandpa!   

My friend was justifiably very proud of his grandfather and he himself had attended the most prestigious private High School I know of and was an Ivy-league business school graduate and, after he got to know me, mentioned that he wanted to get me into his business with him on Wall Street.  He was interesting in other ways too; he was a great runner and he’d founded a charity of marathon running to raise money for pediatrics (once running a marathon in Antarctica!), and he was into a lot of natural health foods.  We’d sometimes work out together and he, though thin, was a workout animal.  I was in great shape for my age but I had a hard time keeping up with him.  We’d climb these big walls of ‘Hesco’ barriers carrying big plate-weights from the gym with us, struggling to push the weights up each level, then climbing up after and lowering them down. Up and down, up and down.  Laughing and cursing. 

One time, we both stayed up all night writing a fantastic proposal together to get funding for a huge road to aid in the flow of agricultural resources to marketplaces.  It was accepted.

Another cool thing about him (I promise I’ll stop soon!):  he always wanted to be on a convoy combat patrol even though all Navy guys were exempt and (legally) even precluded from such patrols.  Because he was on a patrol that had enemy contact early on in the tour, he came to my attention when the big boss moved him into my Operations cell ostensibly as punishment for having got himself into that situation. He was no longer in a position where he could sneak himself onto a combat patrol without everybody knowing.  

I’d always had an adventurous life too, and we’d trade stories. I think he was impressed with the walls I’d climbed over to be where I was; there was a mutual respect. Also, he was one of the few people at that Officer level who held a lot of my centrist and liberal views and so we connected on that level too.

The only uncool thing I remember is when he was asked by his father to write an article for some publication about his experiences in Afghanistan mid-deployment. He presented the article to me to review it and I was stunned that the piece was so anodyne. We were having our faces pressed into the stark realities of this deployment hourly and so I was disappointed in the characterization. But, I figured he was just trying to please his father, and I let it go―but in some ways I regret not ripping into him. We were both fine with intellectually rigorous debate and, indeed, that was probably one of the top things we liked about each other. (Maybe the piece got the requisite polite applause on the Ivy-league lecture tour—I don’t know.)

He knew about my background also:  raised in a public housing project, public High School and eventually going to a State college.  But, none of this mattered, as being ‘war buddies’ transcends all things.  You’ve all seen it in the movies.

Many months after the deployment, I learned (I think from a text chain I was on) that he and his wife were going to be traveling from Connecticut to visit his family’s hunting lodge in Vermont, or Maine or something. To my delight I could see on a map that his route must be going right by my house! I’m talking not two minutes off of the highway. Geographically, it was a crazy lucky coincidence. I texted him about a visit as I wanted to meet his wife and he could meet my family. I had a wonderful two-year old adorable girl and my boy was born while I was on the deployment-he knew about it-and I was especially happy to show off my girl and new little infant boy. Wow! I was thrilled.

Well, I had trouble getting a response from this text.  Crickets.  I was sure there was a technical issue and persisted with emails and actual phone call messages until he responded-and I mean days later-and agreed.  At the time, I still didn’t suspect anything and so had our tiny house (much smaller than the hunting lodge-I’d seen pictures) ready with fine drinks and snacks, etc. 

Here they came.  He and his wife sat on our couch as if they were in a Dentist’s waiting room.  There was some empty strained conversation and then, oh! look at the time!

Wow.  My wife said later that each of them were dressed, head to foot, in the best and most expensive clothing possible and, believe me, my wife knows about nice things.  I guess we’d have to remortgage our house to buy the sweater that his wife was wearing.  And I’ll never own the car they drove.

I wondered what those conversations were like between him and his wife after my invitation and before he finally, and reluctantly, responded. I’d like to hear the exact words.

I was heartsick, and embarrassed that I’d had no clue. We were such good friends and so alike in every way.

Well, every way but one.

And, I guess. . .

that one thing—

it mattered.

HESCO Barrier