Ephemera
New year. New decade. A strange almost paralysis in effect, unwilling to get started on the myriad projects staring me in the face. I owe two books to my publisher, and he is getting restive. I have a third stalled about five chapters from the end that has been stalled for so long I am ashamed to admit how long. (A book that a long-ago first reader — in the previous century; yeah it’s been that long — said might be my best ever.)
And that’s just the writing. Medical issues, insurance issues, legal issues — a busted washing machine I need to replace — stuff stacking up to take to Goodwill, the list (s) go on. I managed two days of very light exercise as the beginning of a resolution to roll back creeping immobility. Two days, full stop.
One of the things I had promised myself was to begin digging in old files for notes that might inspire fresh writing. Today, one small step, I pulled out a handful of pages from a two-year journal I kept 1965–67 during my servitude as an Army draftee. An old editor of mine quoted Thoreau: “I have traveled much in Concord” about his life of the mind on Walden Pond. I traveled much in olive-drab, factually as much as mentally. The notes have served well in construction of a number of stories over the years. I tried to save them to computer files for future reference with limited success — and then that old computer crashed and they were gone again, leaving only the paper. In the many caravansaries I occupied over the ensuing decades the unbound journal pages (unnumbered) became scrambled. I gave up trying to reorganize them years ago. Finally decided I would just take out a few pages and address them as ephemera.
I clipped eight or ten faded pages to the tall golden Clio that stands beside my laptop as a paper-holder. (Have to squint to make out the inscription: 1991 Best Cable TV Advertising Campaign. Seems almost longer ago than Army times. A reminder that I wasted some of my best writing years on the kind of thing that defines ephemera.)
The top page begins in the middle of a sentence…the gaunt always unshaven always weary GI. Two dusty or muddy or frozen files down each side of the road, bucket helmets shading haunted eyes, silent, not singing, not smiling, walking hipshot, rifles slung, shoulders slumped. Basic training or road to Hanoi, ready to disperse at the drone of a plane or crack of a sniper’s rifle. But they keep right on plodding and finally plod into Berlin, or wherever they’re headed…
The next sentence reminds me, all these years later, of the context of the passage from missing previous pages — perhaps still buried in the disorganized pile in that box back in the bedroom.
When the old lifer left, I was still raving on. But I wasn’t too drunk or too wrapped up in what I was saying to see his head up straight when he walked out the door. He looked as if someone had answered a question he had been desperate to know. I hope it was me...
As if it were only last night, I remembered. The lifer was a veteran of Korea and Vietnam, almost old enough to retire, not very articulate but dead-loyal to the Army. And Smythe, a friend of mine, a draftee like me, even more cynical if possible, had been shredding him with cutting remarks about his slavish devotion to duty, drunkenly reciting love poems as the only thing that mattered on earth, sneering that soldiers had no poetry for their sacrifices. Disingenuous. And untrue. In the lifer’s defense I quoted some of Flanders Fields. Smythe countered with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
We were dipping French fries in champagne. Taking pulls from the bottle itself. The buzz-cut lifer leaned in diffidently and asked if I knew the one about the Light Brigade. He said something like didn’t those guys go, even knowing it was a cluster-fuck?
I did know it. “Someone had blundered. Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why,Theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred….”
The old sergeant leaned back. Yeah, that one. Say that one. So I recited all I knew. And what I didn’t know, I made up as I went along. If Smythe recognized the extemporaneous edit, he had the good grace to stay silent.
I skipped a little but got to the point: “Boldly they rode and well, Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of hell. Rode the six hundred…Right through the line they broke; Cossack and Russian Reeled from the sabre stroke. Shattered and sundered.Then they rode back, but not…Not the six hundred…”
And I finished strong: “When can their glory fade?O the wild charge they made! All the world wondered…Honour the Light Brigade,Noble six hundred!”
Smythe was surly in his cups. Sneered at honor, sneered at sacrifice, called them — accurately of course — cannon fodder. We went from poetry to polemic about war and duty and I began to talk about my image of GIs who always answered the call, reluctantly or not, and it was that description that I found on the first page of ephemera. After the lifer left, the post’s recorded bugles played Taps across the frozen German night.
How odd for that to be the first page of long-ago notes I found in my New Year’s plan to look deep into my personal past. I was born in war to a GI father and a mother who stitched canvas weapons covers in an Arsenal. The century gone was full of war. From the headlines, this one looks to be little different.
