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Hanging
On PAGE 3
Can you feature that? Tucking the paper away behind your needlework and walking into town? Kneeling in a corner pew and mumbling the 23rd Psalm? "He maketh me to lie down -- He maketh me to lie down-- He maketh me…" And can you feature, too, that man of 30 standing on the after-edge of youth, looking into middle-age with nothing but his bag of third-hand memories and second-hand grief clutched so instinctively tight the knuckles of his soul are white? Finding the article again, 40 years to the day almost since it was written, and waiting for the great sigh of relief, the undoing of the burden, the letting go of pain? Can you stand with him in his hope to be free to finally walk into adulthood an independent agent? All the time knowing, of course, that that's not what would happen? The weight would not be lifted? Because the lesson left for him to learn was that holding an article about a 40-year-old battle in your hand is just another kind of hanging on. And that the hanging on is permanent because it's what we're made of. And that what is left then can only be forgiveness, if he can find it, and learning to befriend the ghosts. My ghosts. For as I said, despite my youth, I served in the Korean War. I served in it with my father in the bindings of love, and it seems, for all my efforts to escape it, that, day over night, I serve in it still. So I wonder. Can we pierce the disillusion and the cynicism of our jingoistic, Disney-fied so-called culture, the advertising blitzkrieg we live inside, long enough to memorialize beyond the box-office grosses of whatever weekend we happen to be in, the actual havoc wreaked for generations in actual families' actual lives by the wars this community we call a country commits, and to remember the men who fight them -- and now the women too -- and whether we're grateful or not for their service, to give up a moment for the price they pay?
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