The Sons of War

Johnny cried when the doctor told him he couldn’t fight in his brothers’ war. At 17 he needed both his parents’ and his doctor’s permission to get past the twin battlements of youth and infirmity, and now, as in all his life, those ramparts would not fall easily for him. His older brothers Peter and Carmine seemed never to have to scrap against their age or their own bodies; all they seemed to have to do was crack their knuckles and dip a Lucky into the liquid flame of a Zippo and every barrier seemed to fall before them - whether it be a man or boy who tried to keep them from an opening slot on a ball team or the coy inhibitions of a long-lean girl uncontrollably swooning whenever these tough brothers walked by in their infantry dress. But Johnny’s asthma, his hammer toes, his tiny hands and below average weight had all his life kept him from being both a guys’ guy and a woman’s man and now all this and God knew what else would keep him out of a war that everyone knew would either save or end the world. All the way back from Doc Lyons’s office Johnny held down the grunt of shame he felt by squeezing a rubbery ring of pride tighter and tighter around in his throat. But as soon as his mother cut the ignition on their flat grey 1939 Buick and not five seconds after Johnny saw his father sitting in the hard light of the afternoon porch listening to a Dodgers’ game on the Philco radio he had dragged out there, young Johnny opened his throat and the shutters of his eyes and he let out a quiet fall of tears that nonetheless was heard clear across American and all the way from Anzio to Okinawa to the forest of the Ardennes.

You see, this war was not an advertiser’s war. And, even though the government had more than a stake in it, and even though the powers that be were complicit in shaming a commitment out of every man and boy who could run, walk or crawl to a recruiting station, no man or boy living during this war would need to be conned into fighting nor stopped from doing so. No, this war did not need to be promoted, nor the men who fought it sold on the truth of it. This war was not about manufactured patriotism or a pay check in hard times or the thrill of killing a pixilated enemy, this war was an ancient fulcrum on which balanced the history of the world - as simple and as impossible as that. Though he didn’t quite know it yet, Johnny cried his tears that afternoon for every mangled child lying dead on a pile of bodies at Auschwitz, for every mother in London digging her own aged mother from the rubble of a council house, for every German and Italian and Russian and Chinese family cowed into following the mad goose steps of a lunatic dictator, and most of all for Johnny’s own parents who each night pulled air raid blinds down over their windows as they sat still as death waiting for death to pass. In a year Johnny would outgrown the need for his parent’s permission and outlast his governments rejection of him as its own need became more and more desperate. Johnny would get his chance to fight in this war and some months later Johnny’s tears would be stopped forever as he died in this war. But nobody could ever say that Johnny had been tricked into being there just as nobody could say that he hadn’t finally broken through the gates to be there beside his brothers to fight for truth and country and justice for all.

* * *

Sean often ate his lunch at a fast food joint across the street from a strip mall recruiting station. The strip mall was old, but not as old as the story told by the Marines who stood on the sidewalk in their dress blues snapping military issue gum and winking at Sean whenever he walked by on his lunch hour. “Hey, Killer, you gonna tear up the gym today?” And Sean would slick past them, blow back the definition of muscles in his shoulders, nod his head and smile straight and narrow, bright against his brilliant blackness, sending out a flare that told these Jar Heads that they had the boy pegged just right. Sean was a gym rat and a home boy, a stock clerk in the hood and a kid about to crystallize into the hard and fantastic motivations of a man. He was pumped and he was 18 going on gangster and he loved nothing more than to sit in the front room of his grandmother’s subsidized city flat and splatter aliens and drug lords and poorly rendered Iraqis on the Xbox he had bought hot for $30 out of the delivery truck from which Junior Stephens had boosted it. Sean was a cherry ripe for picking into pie and the Marines watched him day after day until they had him lined up just right and he was the lowest of low hanging fruit and they barely needed to even reach up above their heads to pull him down into their recruiting quota.

Summer was already rotting into fall when they got Sean to literally sign his life away. With two wars in full swing and a pundit-primed cultural buzz of evil jihads and twin towers and homeland security and freedom that wasn’t free already fogging Sean like the smoke used to drug creatures less than human, the Marines were able to nab the boy off the street cleaner and faster than if they had strung a hood over his head and clubbed him into the back of a shack on Pier 19. First they got Sean inside with the video games; those especially insidious pieces of digital magic developed for the Army by socially inept MIT geeks and puerile Hollywood storytellers who had sold their talented souls to Uncle Sam. Then, once they had Sean piloting Blackhawks into Afghani mountain cannons and leading a troop of impossibly armored urban warriors into street battles where only the enemy bled and died, they dangled a sack of money right in front of the kid’s face. “Oh yeah, my man, many, many Benjamins gonna be deposited right into a bank account with your name on it, and nothing for you to spend it on because the chow is free and so is the pussy when those fine German and French mommas sees you in parade dress on your R&R in Paris and Berlin.” But Sean wasn’t stupid and when the African American Marine whipped out a hidden box of Cubans and offered Sean a light - “You a Marine now, my brother, and we Marines is a bunch of mother fuckin’ international law breakers. We gonna smoke up that contraband Cuban shit, if we want to. Ain’t that right, Sarge?” - Sean thought he might have caught a whiff of something slavish and fishy. That’s when the Marines hit him with a full frontal assault on his country that went back through the second war to the Great War to that civil war fought so that Sean himself could be free.

Using a final solution of slow-cooked, honest to god pride and patriotism that old Johnny had bled and died for three quarters of a century ago, the Marines had Sean wet-eyed in no time. It was his grandmother painfully dying from a nuclear bomb attack that did Sean in. The thought of turbaned Iraqis marching through Los Angeles and Brooklyn with tactical nukes bolted into titanium suitcases while flesh dripped like gravy from his Grandmother’s face is what finally got Sean to sign. A year later - just seconds before the IED ripped off his arms as he reached back over the seat of the Humvee to get himself a cigarette - Sean was actually thinking about that piece of paper that he signed. He was in fact thinking about how much it was like something hopeful that you might sign to buy a car, or get a marriage license or a hundred of the other things you might do to start your life in an ideal and honest America that for Sean, like the rest of us, was already long gone.

* * *

Take care you fathers of sons and you sons of war. Do not confuse your duty to fight and die with your duty to live and make a better world. Do not be tricked into putting your fragile courage on the table in exchange for piles of silver or into throwing your bravery onto a bloody heap of other men’s guts because someone told you that this is what we men of country have always done. There was a time when the world was purer and we had the slimmest of chances to save ourselves by dying for others. But that time is long gone and now there are forces at work that would swindle you out of your honest bravery and manly pride just to buy another barrel of oil and steal another seat at the table of power. Never forget Johnny’s emotional courage and Sean’s brainy brawn and use every ounce of all of it inside you to fight your way into a thinking man’s peace.

Food, a Fable

Once upon a time there was a father with daughters and these baby girls would joyously eat anything their father laid before them. Food, after all, was a bridge that passed joy between them, something the father saw as the strongest of their physical bonds, and these girls’ appetites were insatiable; they hungered for their father’s love which – even as tiny infants - they sensed he had wrapped tightly inside each morsel he fed them. On his mornings off, when their mother had left for work and this father was the man with the bath and the story book and the walk in the park, these girls, each in their own turn, would giggle and strain to get at the warm oatmeal and whipped bananas or tiny pieces of flaked egg that their father presented to them. A game would be made of the feeding, and as they grew and learned to feed themselves these girls continued to find that playful, simple joy in their meal, creating their own zooming airplane noises and hiding the food briefly before devouring it with a last supper fervor that set fire to the kitchen and warmed the whole house. These girls loved their father that much. And they loved the food he fed them even more because he had nestled his love inside it.

As these girls grew older they continued to see their father’s adoration in the food he and their mother brought home to them. In these cans and boxes and cuts of meat and slices of bread these growing girls saw the affection their father had for their bodies. They knew that all this came from their mother as well, but somehow their father and their food were connected in ways both rapturous and awe-inspiring. This old man was the first man in their lives and they were learning that this food he loved to watch them eat was something powerful that they might somehow use to please him or any man.

One day, when the father least saw it coming, these girls - now well into their teens and rising - started to become more cautious about the food they would accept from him even as they had become more guarded about the shades of his love they would let fall upon the corners of their day. The father had expected that this moment would come when his teenage girls would become distant from him (wiser men than him had told him this was only a matter of time and so he took it like a man). But what he did not know and what surprised him to the point of sleeplessness was how food had become a weapon with which these girls could hold both him and themselves hostage.

It was not that food was something these girls had forgotten about, on the contrary they thought about it all the time. It was just that they had grown into restless young creatures who were being pulled apart by their culture on one hand and their family on the other: their father – their first man - had taught them that food was love even as a sea filled with younger male expectations and glossy consumerism was drowning them in a riptide of perfect bodies they could never become slim or lithe enough to swim against. At night when the bedside light had been switched off and the book he was reading had been folded into a depression on the pillow beside him, the father would toss under his blankets wondering what had gone wrong with his simple plan to simply keep his girls alive with food.

Now don’t think for a minute that the battle these girls had with food was just a battle to stay away from it. No, it took many forms. There were days when one of these girls might eat nothing but grapefruit chased back and forth by bars of dark chocolate, and when questioned on it by their father they would look at the old man with twisted eyes and tell him that some wise doctor had said the grapefruit cut the fat while the chocolate satisfied the cravings of the soul. The father knew all about cravings of the soul but he could only see these as the cravings of a lunatic. On other days, a daughter of his would sit in front of the TV and watch cooking shows from first light to lights out, devouring nothing but this televised food-porn, feeding on nothing but the rays of color emitted from the white mascarpone ice cream and the medallions of pink veal sautéed in a strawberry sauce that seemed to coat and stick to the inside of the screen. Then there were times when all seemed well and one or another of his daughters would cook a meal that would stop the father’s heart with a swell of aromas that took him back to his own childhood, a multi-course feast that she, his daughter, had prepared. But when it came time to eat, the daughter would eat so much as to be out of control, licking the residue from her plate, itching to get at any last crumb she could find, all of this ending when the girl would erupt from the kitchen upon the tiniest look of concern or wonderment from her father. In his aloneness at the table after his wife had left to find and console the daughter, the father would stare off into the dark distance of the night kitchen windows and he would see a baby girl with apple sauce smeared on her cheeks and nuggets of dried cereal stuck to her palms eating mightily with the full power of the woman he still believed she would become.

And ultimately she and her sisters did become that woman. But it took years and miles of patience and a distance that was much closer to the end of his life than it was to the beginning, so that the father was already a grandfather before he knew that his daughters were safe and before he realized what had been wrong with his plan. It was a Sunday morning in early spring when he understood what he would do differently if ever he could do it over again. Now, with another baby girl child sitting in a white plastic high chair in his kitchen, he felt twice blessed - first to have been trusted enough to care for this angel on day as brilliant as this, and second to have the chance to practice once again the feeding of a daughter in the form of this beautiful grandchild before him.

As he prepared his granddaughter’s food that morning, the father thought about what it was he was actually giving to this girl. Yes it was bread dipped in egg, fried into soft toast and then cut into eight perfect squares that the daughter of his daughter would chew admirably using nothing but her two perfect teeth. And yes he was giving it to her with love. But where did this love come from and where was it going and what did it have to do with this food? Something struck the old man hard as he tilted the pan to slide out the girl’s breakfast; struck him as hard as if some cartoon cat had grabbed the skillet from his hand and flattened it against the back of his head with the sound of a Chinese gong.

Cooling the pieces of toast with his own puckered breath, he saw the smile of the child eagerly awaiting it and the father thought of the journey this food would take after he gave it away to her. It would be placed in her mouth, softened by her tongue and the spike of her body’s juices and then pulsed down her throat and into her stomach where its essence would do its part to add substance to her life. At no time on its trip would this food travel through her heart, nor likewise would it visit her brain. And in that thought was the secret that had eluded the father for so many years.

Leaning into his grandchild’s ear, the old man whispered to her, “my love is not this food, darling ...” Kissing her on the forehead he breathed into her hair, “My love for you is love alone and this food is only the food I feed you.” Though she smiled up at him, this baby girl had absolutely no idea what he had said or what he had meant by it. But he knew. As long as he lived he would never again let this child confuse a man’s love with the food she ate or didn’t eat. As long as he could feed himself, he would teach this child to feed herself and others – not out of fear nor desperation nor a need to be perfect or wanted – but to be nourished and nourished alone.

Food, after all, was nothing more than this.

In All of Our Living

Yesterday I watched as my three children laid me to rest. There they stood beside my body, two pairs of blue eyes and one pair brown looking down at me, alternating between tears and sniff-dried smiles as their mother greeted public mourners and they hugged each other with the private arms of vanished memories and inside jokes. If I do say so myself, my wake and funeral were quite an event, something worth waiting for, a real sight for these sore, dead eyes. From inside the box and then from up above I watched the whole thing, and I had the time of my life seeing my life go on without me.

At the church, my wife and daughters stood steady in the first row of benches like the remaining front line of the team that we were - a crowd gathering behind them, they held up well against the searchers staring into the backs of their heads. Given that they had never practiced this play before I was very proud of them. This is not to say that there weren’t a few glitches. As always, the minister badly mispronounced our last name in the eulogy making my middle daughter roll her eyes and sigh so loudly that her older sister scolded her with a head shake which then nearly started a fight between them. For a minute, I thought I might have to come back from my resting place and break them up like I used to when they were small and I’d storm into their rooms to pull them apart with my own hands. Truthfully, I wouldn’t have minded getting the chance to do that one last time, but in the end they got it together, each ultimately smirking at the idiocy of the moment and grabbing hands across the front of their little sister who then put her hand peacefully upon theirs.

The scene at the cemetery was anticlimactic as it always is with these things – you could tell that most everybody was pretty tired of me by this point. My insistence on dying in the middle of their lives as I had really messed up their work and school schedules not to mention the inconvenience of dark suits and dresses that quickly needed to be dry cleaned and phone calls that they didn’t want to have to make, and so they really just wanted to get the hell away from me by this point. And I can’t say as I blame them. First of all what else could they do or say after days of writing out sympathy cards and making casseroles and salads and uncomfortably hugging my wife and children while whispering in their ears how sorry they were and how strong we all needed to be . And second of all, even though it is now the month of March the bone yard was still freezing yesterday (if you want my recommendation, I would tell you to try to die in late spring or early summer as people tend to want to hang around a little longer – if not for you, since you’ll be dead anyway, then for your family) - even I was looking forward to being placed under the frost line with a nice warm blanket of dirt around me on a day such as it was yesterday.

A decent size crowd gathered at our house after the service at the grave. The were almost more people than could comfortably fit in our kitchen and living room and dining room – I probably had the best view of anyone in the house so believe me when I tell you how packed the place was. I have to admit that my wife was right when she convinced me not to downsize to a smaller house so we wouldn’t have to work so hard any more. Even though I was dead, it was nice to see that people had at least a little room left over to move around inside our home and it’s always good when there are enough toilets to accommodate more than a couple of mourners at a time. I think people were impressed with how nice we had kept up the place and my wife got more than a couple of compliments on the antiques in the dining room and the picture of us and the kids on the fireplace mantel.

Of course, it wouldn’t have been a gathering after a funeral without a bit of drama and that came in the form of a couple of women whom had flirted with me over the years deciding to show up and spend some time chatting with my wife. My daughters were ready to kill these batty old girls - I actually watched my oldest take a knife from the butcher block holder at the corner of the kitchen counter and slam it hard down on a lump of cheese while eyeing one of these crazy women who was showing a little too much cleavage and smiling a little too happily as she walked away from paying her personal respects to my wife. Believe me nothing ever came from any of these affairs of the mind. But as women will do, my daughters rallied behind their mother, soon forming a wedge around her to protect her from that which she never needed to be protected from in the first place. Near the end of the gathering, when almost everyone had left the house, I settled the bulk of my spirit in an ottoman at the front of the wing chair where my wife was sitting and, summoning everything I had left to give, I let my invisible head fall onto my wife’s lap which - although she could not have know it was there - seemed to calm her anyway as she smoothed a wrinkle in her skirt just as if she were stroking my hair.

When all was said and done and everyone gone - when evening had come and the lights in the house were turned off, all except those in the bedrooms where my daughters and wife were resting - I began my last look around the place. I had to leave for good now and, as I always did, I wanted to make sure that the doors were locked and that the coffee pot was off and that the grounds outside the house were quiet and that all possible menaces were as far from my family as my dead eyes could see. I am the father after all, and who else will do these things I am the husband and the man of the house for now and forever and ever and that is just what we do.

I feathered my sleeping daughters with goodbye kisses as I had many times before the early dawn leavings of my business trips – one kiss for the oldest, two for the middle and three to bless the youngest on her cheek - and I then lay down weightlessly beside the warm body of wife waiting a bit before drifting away and away and away.

* * * * *

Yesterday I went to a real funeral and soberly I watched a father’s children lay him to rest. Who he was and who they are will not be important to you, but what I learned may be: step back and see yourself and your family on the day of your parting and you will see yourself in all of your living. Daydream about the ones you love on the days after the final days of your life and you will cherish more all the days you have left to live. All your blunders will be there in plain view as will all your triumphs. The seeds of all the things you never said and all the actions you never dared to take will sprout before you and it will then be up to you to cultivate them before you go.

Don’t miss this chance, my dear fathers (and mothers too) – even as the early spring blossoms into life around us - we are already all on our way.