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.

Deja Alanon

So I'm having a bad week. Full moon, pending dreary elections, moody weather, and ending a relationship which feels like a final farewell to anything vaguely impulsive and the last of my serial midlife crises. While virtually everyone in my life disapproved of the guy, now that I've broken it off, they've chosen this moment to rub my nose in the degradation of it and punish me when I'm down and solitary.

Tonight, reluctant to call a therapist and hitting a new bottom, I decided to go to an Alanon meeting. After all, the guy was apparently a drug addict-- or at least an alcoholic, and I'm a lifetime enabler. Not knowing the protocol, I entered slightly late, missed the 'reading' which was the catalyst for the sharing... and I'm listening to person after person trying to be thankful for some kind of abundance but hating themselves, their life, confessing to weakness, sounding totally self-involved and 'stuck'. Still, it is all I can do to keep from crying because I am feeling not just fragile but exhausted from 2 weeks of sleep deprivation and emotional abuse. I relate to everyone... but actually to no one. I pass when it is my turn to share, until there is a request for newcomers to speak....
A young attractive girl begins to cry, she has been engaged to marry a very successful and handsome young executive and has found instead that he is an addict, has witnessed her life falling apart, and she needs to know, wants to know... is there any 'tip' or suggestion as to how to simply get through these nights... it has been a month and she is inconsolable, angry, devastated....doesn't anyone have anything to offer?

And of course, I-- the dysfunctional meddling classic enabler, do the absolutely verboten taboo thing and answer her. I tell her--- I was in exactly her position, 22 years ago... the perfect husband, the perfect marriage, the envy of all my friends... but I was pregnant, and in another country... and it all unravelled. It will be okay, I tell her... you will find something to hold onto, you will find a way to get through and you will be okay.

So the guy who spoke endlessly about putting his left foot in front of his right until the timer-person had to stop him...interrupts me, and tells me there is absolutely no 'crosstalk' permitted at an Alanon meeting. Meaning this is not group therapy, but each person just 'shares' and the rest listen politely, pass a 'hat', hold hands and recite the 'serenity prayer' even though their boyfriend at home has just been threatening them with a switchblade, their mother is dying of some oozing horror and it is on their shirt, or their kids have just locked themselves in the bathroom and are smoking up many grams of crack.

Meaning also that in my current state of utter failure as a romantic partner, as a friend, as a musician because my emotional state is affecting my performance... I have now not only Failed at Alanon, but sabotaged the whole program. Of course, one kind woman sheepishly offered the pathetic defense that my transgression was heartfelt, and it was... but this did little to dispel the aura that there was a traitor in their midst and that the poor young girl whose boyfriend was in rehab was now damaged beyond repair by my maternal instinct and my obviously shitty advice.

I was once warned by an 'ex' not to ever enter these 'rooms'... that this is not the sort of thing I could find credible, that I would absorb the deep unhappiness of each of the participants and I inevitably would question the appropriateness of my candidacy for the program as a whole, as did he...

Of course since no one of my friends is speaking to me, I may now seek refuge with the pitbull himself, or I may have to find a 12-step program for people who fail at 12-step programs.... or I may have to weigh my cross and my star and my horoscope and see which of those might lead me to find my higher power. I seem to gravitate to the lower power, you see... and there doesn't seem to be a B-side to Alanon, or AA, or to any of my issues tonight. I seem to have learned very little from my relationships, except that love still seems to be the thing that all of these people cannot master, despite the steps, the meetings, the higher power thing... that whether or not we love ourselves, we seek some kind of company... and sitting in a circle in uncomfortable chairs, like a pro-tem anti-depressant, is not going to heal me or that poor beautiful girl who was trying desperately to assert that her boyfriend didn't 'deserve' her. Someone will, I wanted to say. Someone will... at least we hope so.

Truth is, we deserve nothing. We get what we get, we give what we give. Some of us give too much and it feels good... or it hurts. People hurt us, things hurt us, we hurt ourselves. This is how I know I am alive. Love hurts, birth hurts, death undoubtedly will hurt too. I read a great Bob Marley quote this morning... he seemed to know something about love...'Truth is, he said, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.' Healthy, addictive, generous, selfish... we all come back for more in some form or other.

So pick up your pen or your guitar and get over it.