They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait

My son, as well as billions of other statistically-conscious tech subscribers, counts his daily steps.  Apparently, without arranging this,  he demonstrated how the little phone he forces on me automatically records my every move, and probably some other things, although now that I'm finding it 'parental' and invasive, I am careful to leave it home often.  My son, competitive by nature, easily exceeds 20,000 steps daily.  This includes some morning runs... but still, it's fairly impressive. 

My father was a pacer.  He paced the hallways of our home; unless he was drinking and reading the papers, he was generally fretting about something.  While he drove or commuted by train, I'd walk with him when he allowed-- on a holiday, to a funeral or service... he was impatient, and for a man who was average height, he had a huge stride.  I ran to keep up with him-- or I skipped, or side-hopped; he paid little attention to me.  I can only imagine if they'd had cellphones back then, he'd be walking, like his grandson, constantly checking market prices or news.  Bad news seemed to engage him more.  It was as though he waited for this-- he took odds against better outcomes; the consolation prize for downturns was a sort of private victory. 

Every Memorial Day since his death, I try to take some moments to honor his difficult legacy: there are the medals and citations-- the wounds which healed, and the ones that didn't. In my childhood home attic, among scrap books and memorabilia, were boxes of his various uniforms.  On top sat a pair of brown leather paratrooper boots-- the final pair he was wearing on the beaches of Normandy, and the pair he wore when they liberated the camp at Dachau.  The boots were wrinkled and scuffed; the heels were well worn, and the weight of them was considerable.  I'd put them on, as a girl, and could barely lift my feet. We never took these things downstairs. I'm not sure he ever looked at them... he rarely went up, except to adjust the huge house fan or to whack a couple of bats from the eaves.  

We barely spoke from Middle School onward.  He was a tough man, with emotional burdens beyond anything I comprehended.  He'd come from a large family of embittered immigrants.  It seemed there was no joy anywhere in his past-- not a single happy photo. In fact, there were no photos, save the official US Army portraits. I was a little unforgiving and tough myself; I had my ideas and my leanings-- my poetry and my art.  None of this interested him. He laid it out one day-- if anything should happen to my mother, my sister and I should pack our bags because it was beyond him to take care of girls.  I took it to heart.

Still, as children do, I struggled. Not just taking two or three steps for every one of his, but to extract even one tiny instant of acknowledgment. My high-school literary magazine chose to publish a drawing I did of his combat boots.  At first I didn't understand that this was my version of a portrait-- a tribute.  He said nothing about it, nor about the poetry that meant much to me. He acknowledged a writing award I won at graduation; it came with a check toward college and that seemed to satisfy him in some way.  The boots obsessed me.  My two friends and I bought old ice-skates and removed the blades with great difficulty.  They were stiff and it was hard to walk-- but we wore them to school, like soldiers.  

I'm reading Tomás Nevinson-- the final brilliant novel from Javier Marías.  One feels a kind of relief in these literary authors that not only assume a kind of common referential canon but are willing to violate it. There is an anecdote, at the beginning, after a terse discussion on the finality of death via guillotine, when he relates the miracle of St. Denis who carried his severed head over five miles to his burial site.  Apparently a woman commented-- it's not the distance, it's the first step that counted.  This becomes a theme-- taking the first step. And the corollary-- the step you didn't take-- the opportunity to assassinate Hitler before he masterminded and enabled the evil Reich nightmare which resulted in not just massive tragedy but consequently my own father's heroic military trajectory. 

My son and his friends do not enlist; nor are they drafted.  They have other wars to fight-- other competitions.  There is sports, in the service of which many kids extract some of the lessons of military training.  On this holiday, we watch endless documentaries and films; every generation has its own demons and its own horrible wars.   In the ceremonies and memorials everything is clean and uniformed and honorable. The way a soldier dies is beyond horrible.  The witnesses-- their comrades-- carry these images forever.  Maybe the most difficult steps my father took in later life were the twelve designated by AA.  While he remained sober, I don't think he saw them through, nor did he reap the benefit of relief or enlightenment.

But I realized, on Memorial Day-- opening the Marías book after going several thousand steps with my son, how much the psychology of these former spies and agents and old soldiers-- many of whom survived the horror only physically-- feels familiar.  I somehow absorbed bits of the wounds and shadows that scarred my father's capacity for joy.  Perhaps the boots were not just souvenir battlefield-testimony but a version of his emotional legacy as well. RIP, my father and all old soldiers-- forgotten, memorialized, decorated, mutilated, buried, missing, glorified, dishonored, misunderstood, and forever changed.

Sleepers

Most of my friends complain about interrupted sleep.  As one ages it becomes less straightforward-- the biology of it, I suppose. And for those of us in New York City apartments, waking, we often hear our neighbors above-- more often now that they are aging, and sleep no doubt in separate rooms.. one walks around, whatever... we invent narratives.

When I was small I thought love meant you slept together in a bed; I'd imagine the scenario-- it was chaste and romantic. I was one of those children who tucked myself in at night with a menagerie of stuffed animals... giraffes and lions and Yogi Bears and Pinocchios-- Raggedy Anne and other squishy creatures with sad eyes.  Recently there was a piece in the Times about adults and their stuffed sleep companions. Not that I pass judgment. In fact the whole issue has become a major industry-- the way food is so complicated-- now it's customized mattresses and the science of blankets and temperatures-- sound machines and gourmet sheets.  It's a lot, as they say on television.

Many of my friends no longer sleep with their significant other. Together they toss and turn and worry; they blame their partner for insomnia.  Whenever I've had a long-term relationship, sleeping together was essential.  Break-ups meant re-acclimating to sleeping separately; this alone was difficult and occasionally the habit lingered and we'd 'cheat' and spend an occasional night together.  It was confusing and reassuring at once.  But it wasn't just sex, it was the intimacy of sleep.  Even the old one night stands... sometimes I longed to stand staring out of a hotel window, anticipating the strangeness of someone under sheets.  One night on the road I crawled in bed with one of the roadies and he told me things no one had ever told me.  It was like we enacted some scene from a play that had been written just for us; it felt significant and deeply affecting.  Neither of us discussed it afterward.  

Now that these things are mostly in my past, I rummage through them occasionally, to remember who I have been, where and with whom.  Sometimes I have these dreams, although I am generally sleeping with a book these days... and I awake listening to my neighbors who are sleeping alone in a common space, who live separate lives now, as many of us do.  My own father used to fall asleep with the television on; in those days the programming ended at a certain point.  If I were awake I'd hear the national anthem, and if I peeked in, the screen would show those horrid stripes until dawn. No one dared turn it off.

Being awake in the 21st century and checking programming in overnight hours, there are myriad reruns of old sitcoms and TV dramas.  Sex and the City repeats endlessly.  It occurs to me that this is calming for adults-- the way our kids would watch Thomas the Tank Engine videos hundreds of times... over and over. Stressed out people anesthetize themselves with familiar old shows-- memories, visions of New York when they were happier or younger.  Maybe this helps them sleep.

This afternoon, in the rain, I passed the new uptown Barnes and Noble store; the window is filled with pretty much the same childhood classics I read over and over at bedtime: The Hungry Caterpillar, Thomas the Tank Engine... there were dolls and stuffed animals of these same familiar characters-- Elmo, whose name my son pronounced with this very southern accent... the Wild Things, soft train cars with happy faces. Standing beside me was a young British woman from Manchester, with a little girl who was-- yes, holding out her arms to me.  I was surprised-- it was raining-- they were wet, as I was. English people are more accustomed to these drizzles and don't always bother with an umbrella. But children are not so friendly these days-- nor are mothers post-pandemic anxious for strangers to touch their babies.  This child-- maybe 18 months-- was smiling in the most extravagant way at me, and insisting I take her-- me with my terrible arm, I was unable to really lift her properly. She's friendly, her Mom explained, but not like this.  It was as though she recognized me-- there was this absolutely palpable connection and a kind of love I hadn't felt in so long, it brought me to tears-- this lovely little Irish face with sparkling eyes... too young to care about material things.. and there we were:  me, tearing up in the rain, feeling so connected to this child and my lost  days of baby-rearing. The mother, too-- she started to cry... maybe her Mom was overseas or had died... I thought of possibilities... and we looked in the window, and we repeated the names of the characters... as though we were family... and the child-- not quite up to speech, was just happily holding her arms out and trying hard to hug and kiss me as much as I could manage.

It was clear the baby did not want to stop this game with me... and finally I made an awkward excuse and left.  The entire window display imprinted in my visual mind, I went down toward the East River. On the way, I passed St. Monica's church which seemed to beckon; the glass doors were open and the music seeping out. It was the six o'clock mass... and I stood in the back while the priest read the daily passage and proclaimed that God is love.. and it made sense to me, having been lessoned by the little Irish girl.  This is it... the whole church singing and proclaiming, yes... Hallelujah, etc... all of us sleepers in various rooms, underneath the same celestial ceiling... receiving a kind of reprieve, a kind of love.