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rmMy ex- grew up, quite literally, in the shadow of West Point. He lived not in the town considered to be its home but rather in the town adjacent to its back gate. In the course of our relationship, I spent a lot of time there, because his parents still lived there, and as many of you know, they were both quite ill at the end of our relationship.
Mostly, Michael didn't talk about West Point in any context other than to say where he lived and to make it a place other than a small town where old men drank all day because they had nothing better to do. His mother was a school teacher and died of cancer. A lot of people in the town died of cancer, there was a cluster there, and many of them talked about how it must have something to do with secret things going on at West Point.
Sometimes, he said, you can hear guns and cannons. I wasn't really sure anyone at West Point would have any damn reason to shoot a cannon anymore, but it was the type of thing he'd tell me as we stood on a bridge and looked at the view. They stored ammunition there, during the Civil War he said, pointing to a small island in the middle of the Hudson.
One summer, it was all one summer which is odd in seven years, he took me to West Point a lot. The first time we drove around, parked at some forlorn abandoned gate down a hill and sat there in the middle of the day while he talked about drinking out there with his friends in high school and getting chased by MPs and how they'd speed back to town with their headlights off and eyes closed. Another time, we walked along the edge of the sports field and I watched girls play soccer; they seemed happy. He took me to the library, and other times we hiked behind the houses of the lower ranking staff. The last time, we walked around the parade grounds and he pointed to the houses where the important staff lived, and told me all the random trivia he'd acquired over the years of living near there, of growing up with kids whose parents taught there and of invariably knowing people who attended as well.
That day, he talked about how he regretted constantly not realizing when he needed to realize it that it was something he should have pursued. Guidance counsellors he said talked to him about it a lot in school. He wished he had been more athletic and said it appealed to his sense of honour, and I feel dishonest not commenting on that, but also know enough that my thoughts on that are worthless if you don't know the man, which most of you don't. It was, the way he presented it that day at any rate, something he dwelled on all the time, which I think it was, as much as he was capable of any consistancy of thought.
The last death in the first Iraq war was his hated, dreaded, feared high school rival and Michael always worried about symmetry imcomplete, which is why he hated my own similar tendencies.
I used to live three blocks from the Vietnam Wall in Washington DC and I spent a lot of time there, because it was quiet or interesting. Because I was close to Vietnam vets for really the first and only time in my life then, and because it was a place I could cry in public, which I sometimes felt the need to then, even if it was over different things. Also, it was near my home, and DC had places to pray in the dark at night in the way New York doesn't, and that is a gift to anyone who lives there.
People would stop me and ask the way to the Wall all the time when my arms were so full of groceries I had to stop and put them down every twenty feet. People live here, but they didn't understand, and that bothered me, their inability to see the memorial as a common part of our lives, as well as extraordinary.
Tonight I watched a National Georgraphic program on Arlington Cemetary, and learned all sorts of facts about it I never knew. It was very interesting and affecting. Section 60 is where the dead from this Iraq war go, and there are, according the program, approximately 100 buried there.
If you take the DC Metro past Arlington Cemetary at night, the doors do not open at that station. But the trains always slow down and sometimes stop. It's an eerie thing, but just one of the many things you get used to in a city that was built for ideals rather than people. I thought of that today for the first time in years. It reminds me of how the trains were here after 9/11, but this isn't about that.
I've never told this to anyone, but when I was a young teen, I used to read British music magazines, and one had a penpal section in it. I wrote letters to some of the listings, because they liked the same bands as me. And I got letters back from these boys, who were in fact 18-year-olds in the Navy. My mother found the letters and ripped them up. My father spoke to me about how I must never write to these men again, they only wanted to sully me, I would have to live with the rudeness of not even being allowed to write them back to tell them I could not write to them any longer. But they are so alone, I wailed and they like the Cure and how could they have been any danger to me when their letters were as jejune as my own? I still remember their handwriting.
Growing up, I learnt many odd things as absolutes. Strange entreaties about health, language and manners. I learnt that for a woman to marry before thirty in New York was considered ignorant, and that only those who are poor or not smart enough for college join the military.
As I've gotten older, I've learned that almost everything learnt in that childhood is untrue, and that the few things that were true (French as a diplomatic and necessary language for all educated souls) no longer are. Sometimes this makes me sad, but mostly, it quietly confounds me, this constant discovery that I grew up in a world that was such an odd mix of one that no longer exists and another than never did at all.
In that childhood, military men were strange, unwholesome creatures, not because their profession was inclined to require them to kill, but because they were presented to me as men so ignorant as to allow themselves to be taken from the company of ladies, and then so greedy as to wish to ruin any they could find.
Obviously, these fictive souls have given way to the realities of friends, lovers and well... lj'ers. But it is strange, there is a thirteen-year-old girl in me who will always be unsure on this topic, confounded, lost and lonely, which truthfully is as it should be. But I've had to struggle with her to find the nerve even to send something to someone on www.booksforsoldiers.com, tenacious and peculiar child that she is.
All of it makes me think of Michael and his dead classmate, and growing up in the shadow of West Point and what strange aches, peculiar honour and childhood admonitions haunted him into a different set of choices (or at least a particular narrative) which never seemed to serve him very well.
Mostly, Michael didn't talk about West Point in any context other than to say where he lived and to make it a place other than a small town where old men drank all day because they had nothing better to do. His mother was a school teacher and died of cancer. A lot of people in the town died of cancer, there was a cluster there, and many of them talked about how it must have something to do with secret things going on at West Point.
Sometimes, he said, you can hear guns and cannons. I wasn't really sure anyone at West Point would have any damn reason to shoot a cannon anymore, but it was the type of thing he'd tell me as we stood on a bridge and looked at the view. They stored ammunition there, during the Civil War he said, pointing to a small island in the middle of the Hudson.
One summer, it was all one summer which is odd in seven years, he took me to West Point a lot. The first time we drove around, parked at some forlorn abandoned gate down a hill and sat there in the middle of the day while he talked about drinking out there with his friends in high school and getting chased by MPs and how they'd speed back to town with their headlights off and eyes closed. Another time, we walked along the edge of the sports field and I watched girls play soccer; they seemed happy. He took me to the library, and other times we hiked behind the houses of the lower ranking staff. The last time, we walked around the parade grounds and he pointed to the houses where the important staff lived, and told me all the random trivia he'd acquired over the years of living near there, of growing up with kids whose parents taught there and of invariably knowing people who attended as well.
That day, he talked about how he regretted constantly not realizing when he needed to realize it that it was something he should have pursued. Guidance counsellors he said talked to him about it a lot in school. He wished he had been more athletic and said it appealed to his sense of honour, and I feel dishonest not commenting on that, but also know enough that my thoughts on that are worthless if you don't know the man, which most of you don't. It was, the way he presented it that day at any rate, something he dwelled on all the time, which I think it was, as much as he was capable of any consistancy of thought.
The last death in the first Iraq war was his hated, dreaded, feared high school rival and Michael always worried about symmetry imcomplete, which is why he hated my own similar tendencies.
I used to live three blocks from the Vietnam Wall in Washington DC and I spent a lot of time there, because it was quiet or interesting. Because I was close to Vietnam vets for really the first and only time in my life then, and because it was a place I could cry in public, which I sometimes felt the need to then, even if it was over different things. Also, it was near my home, and DC had places to pray in the dark at night in the way New York doesn't, and that is a gift to anyone who lives there.
People would stop me and ask the way to the Wall all the time when my arms were so full of groceries I had to stop and put them down every twenty feet. People live here, but they didn't understand, and that bothered me, their inability to see the memorial as a common part of our lives, as well as extraordinary.
Tonight I watched a National Georgraphic program on Arlington Cemetary, and learned all sorts of facts about it I never knew. It was very interesting and affecting. Section 60 is where the dead from this Iraq war go, and there are, according the program, approximately 100 buried there.
If you take the DC Metro past Arlington Cemetary at night, the doors do not open at that station. But the trains always slow down and sometimes stop. It's an eerie thing, but just one of the many things you get used to in a city that was built for ideals rather than people. I thought of that today for the first time in years. It reminds me of how the trains were here after 9/11, but this isn't about that.
I've never told this to anyone, but when I was a young teen, I used to read British music magazines, and one had a penpal section in it. I wrote letters to some of the listings, because they liked the same bands as me. And I got letters back from these boys, who were in fact 18-year-olds in the Navy. My mother found the letters and ripped them up. My father spoke to me about how I must never write to these men again, they only wanted to sully me, I would have to live with the rudeness of not even being allowed to write them back to tell them I could not write to them any longer. But they are so alone, I wailed and they like the Cure and how could they have been any danger to me when their letters were as jejune as my own? I still remember their handwriting.
Growing up, I learnt many odd things as absolutes. Strange entreaties about health, language and manners. I learnt that for a woman to marry before thirty in New York was considered ignorant, and that only those who are poor or not smart enough for college join the military.
As I've gotten older, I've learned that almost everything learnt in that childhood is untrue, and that the few things that were true (French as a diplomatic and necessary language for all educated souls) no longer are. Sometimes this makes me sad, but mostly, it quietly confounds me, this constant discovery that I grew up in a world that was such an odd mix of one that no longer exists and another than never did at all.
In that childhood, military men were strange, unwholesome creatures, not because their profession was inclined to require them to kill, but because they were presented to me as men so ignorant as to allow themselves to be taken from the company of ladies, and then so greedy as to wish to ruin any they could find.
Obviously, these fictive souls have given way to the realities of friends, lovers and well... lj'ers. But it is strange, there is a thirteen-year-old girl in me who will always be unsure on this topic, confounded, lost and lonely, which truthfully is as it should be. But I've had to struggle with her to find the nerve even to send something to someone on www.booksforsoldiers.com, tenacious and peculiar child that she is.
All of it makes me think of Michael and his dead classmate, and growing up in the shadow of West Point and what strange aches, peculiar honour and childhood admonitions haunted him into a different set of choices (or at least a particular narrative) which never seemed to serve him very well.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-10 08:51 pm (UTC)West Point has a cannon which fires every day, at retreat.
Arlington: What's to say? When I was at Walter Reed I donned my uniform (for the only time I wore it in the two months I was in hospital there) to go and visit. My step-father's dad is buried there, and the Tomb of the Unknowns, well it's different for me than it was the last time I was there.
The back of the cemetary, with the ancient dead (those re-interred from before the place was stolen from the Lees) is a jumble, monuments and histories graven on stone. So different from the ceaseless rows of white.
The saddest thing I saw was a pair of headstones, one above the other, with the same last name, about 25 years apart for date of birth, less for the date of death, and the younger preceding the elder.
TK
no subject
Date: 2004-11-10 09:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-10 09:15 pm (UTC)Washington note -- I totally agree with how there are so many places to cry in public in DC. During some of my rougher years while I was still living there, I used to make frequent trips to the Jefferson Memorial and just sob my eyes out late at night. I also used to go to the senate or house gallery after six and just watch proceedings.
And the tourists never understood that we live there and that DC isn't just there for tour groups bringing hundreds of fourth graders to stare at something that has little or no meaning to them.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-10 10:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-10 10:33 pm (UTC)This renewed my memories of growing up in D.C. in the 60s and early 70s (1960-76), in Northwest Washington, right behind American University. The Wall hadn't been built yet and the war was in full force, then, but the city was as ... it was when you were there. Perhaps less turmoil (race riots and protests filled my childhood), but the train did indeed pause at Arlington back then, as well as other oddments that make life in D.C. a strange and wonderful place, full of (as you say so eloquently) ideals and images. Perhaps the city is self-aware that it was built to be not only a French idealistic city plan (Lafayette's great plan, abandoned several concentric circles of avenues) but a city that echoed the greatness of Athens, of Rome, full of classical architecture and classical statuary.
What I always remember are the sounds in Northwest of the National Cathedral tolling at noon (muffled bells -- they are only rung unmuffled during state occasions and on the high church holidays; even the muffled bells can carry for several miles), and prayer call from the big mosque down on Wisconsin Avenue throughout the day (the one that had the hostage-taking in the 60s, replete with SWAT teams; the more times change, the less they really change, alas). And, for me, the carolon ringing the Winchester chimes at Weslyan Seminary at American University, at the end of my home street block. Every fifteen minutes, dare I say it, like clockwork. It leant a distinctly European flavor to my life.
I, too, learned French as the international language: the language schooled young ladies must learn in order to function in a proper society. The (then) language of diplomacy and the U.N.
Odd how those skills have faded, yet some linger as reminders of another era. And come in handy -- I have had chance to use my ability to perform a proper British curtsy to royalty. :)
no subject
Date: 2004-11-11 06:20 am (UTC)I'm not sure if you know, but quite a bit of my family is in the military. My father is retired Navy and most of my cousins chose basic training over college.
San Antonio is also a huge military town with over 3 bases. The suburb where I grew up is primarily retired military although there are some younger couples moving in now.
I have always been taught to revere those in the military and in fact am both fascinated and confounded by them.
It's very interesting to get a different viewpoint.
Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-11 03:16 pm (UTC)Mom likes to tell the anectdote that it seems odd how life works out, witnessed by both my and my sisters career development. My sister is a musician with the Air Force. It all started from a job search in which a position was (supposedly) opening at their academy in Colorado Springs. Fast forward 15 years, and she's still in the Air Force, playing with the ceremonial brass in Washington D.C..
Myself, I never made it into the military. Growing up of course things military were 'cool' and worthy of attention amongst myself and my friends. Many of us had fathers who were in the military, either drafted or voluntary, and it was a normal part of a fathers history.
In high school I was in ROTC, which happened to be air force. I'd always wanted to be a pilot, was fascinated with warbirds, it seemed a natural fit. I was in ROTC in college as well, except the University of Texas at Arlington only had Army. As luck had it, they had an agreement with the detatchment at TCU which was Air Force.
When the two-year mark to that program arrived for me, it was decision time. AT that point you have to commit to finishing college in two years, then it was off to basic training for you. The way my college career was going, there was no way I could guarantee being done in two years at the time.
To help screw things up further, I discovered a handful of reasons why I was not going to become a pilot, wasn't going to be able to land in the alternate role I wanted (except by pure chance), and began to have considerable doubts if I would be able to last 20 years with a commission or not.
See, somewhere, I got it into my head that it wasn't worth joining if there was no chance of earning a commission. I didn't want to be non-commissioned and in the elisted ranks forever.
These days I view that as a tremendous mistake on my part. I never looked upon those in the military as being desparate or destitute, although the adage was still around that "the military makes men out of bums...and vice versa."
But I always find myself jealous of those who have served in the military. They have an instant commeraderie that is unmatch in any other circle I have witnessed. How my friends who did serve are able to find common ground with my dad, who served during Korea, simply stuns me. I think it's great...and I shall always feel I missed out on something spectacular.
Growing up the idea of being a soldier had everything to do with being a part of a team, and organization, that was the best. Heroics and highly admirable actions simply came with the territory. They were all heroes.
Holding them in that esteem also lent it's sense of structure and discipline to how I expected to live my adult life. You were given a job to do, you did it, managed not to screw it up and you get promoted every so often, increasing your responsability and authority. Probably a large part of my unhappiness and sense of feeling 'adrift' in a far less structured corporate world can be traced to this.
I do find it a bit sad that the 13 year old girl inside of you still sees people that are part of our military service as strange, unwholesome ignorant creatures.
Anyway, I enjoyed this post. I enjoyed your perspective, and I relate to how you describe Michael and his regret at not having pursued the military further.
Now my sister lives along the Metro route. Her wedding was in the post chapel at Arlington Cemetary. I have ridden the train you speak of, have wandered the grounds at Arlington and been awed by the number of stories there that have gone untold.
As I said, ran askew on a tangent but every time I tried to write a comment I kept coming back to this stuff, so who was I to deny it? Just battled between keeping it a comment or it's own post..!
Thank you for sharing.