15 April 2009

spring awakening

For months and months, I've been hibernating. Even when people suggested interesting sounding things to do in the (dark) evenings, I could not summon the energy to do them. Because I was tired. And it was dark. And I was tired. And it was cold. And I was tired.

Wah, wah, wah.

I went out after work today, for the first time in a very long time. I ate garlic fries and drank a mojito and laughed. We told stories. I told the story about the p*nis p1ercing. (Don't ask. I can only assure you that it was law-related and had nothing to do with my personal life.)

I felt like I was waking up, finally, slowly.

On the way home, walking along the water, the sky was big enough, clear enough, to be a dome again. The clouds flitted around the edges. The dark was coming from one direction and the light leaving in the other.

The man sitting in front of me on the train started a conversation with the man across the aisle, who had joined the army in 1944 as a 16-year-old. "I lied about my age," the man across the aisle said, in his jacket with military patches, holding his little US flag straight up on his knee "and there was a 14-year-old who enlisted the same day, but he had the option of the branches and he went into the navy. I was stuck in the army because my vision was 20/30 and I was underweight."

He explained how he'd been in the *** Airborne, in France and then in Germany and Austria with the Allied Occupation. "We were headed to the Pacific," he said, "but they dropped the bomb on Nagasaki and the war was over. It was the best day of my life. I was terrified to go to the Pacific."

He talked about his plane, the one he jumped out of, and how he saw one fly over this morning and he knew it by the sound of the engine, so familiar. As I got off the train, he was explaining the training they got, and how many men could not make the first jump off the tower, how that weeded out so many men.

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