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.